There are various tools that can help assess your core website vitals, such as PageSpeed Insights ,SEO Insight tools and Chrome DevTools Lighthouse. These can identify areas for improvement so that a plan can be put into action to address them.
Page performance is actually a major factor of SEO. If your website loads slowly and takes a long time to respond to user interactions, search algorithms will downgrade your ranking. Good user experience will reduce bounce rates and conversions.
First Input Delay
This metric measures the time from user input to when the browser starts processing it. The faster the response, the more responsive the page feels, and the better the impression you’ll be making on your users. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) replaced First Input Delay (FID) on 31 March 2024.
If any of your scores end up in this metric, the best course of action is to focus on tasks that take the longest, and then follow our Core Web Vitals guide on how to implement fixes.
But just to be clear, metric scores for FID, LCP and CLS in Lighthouse’s Overview report are scored based on real-world field data, not lab data, because you can use an excellent page template and still see worse than expected performance when pages are loaded in real-world use, and because web environments can shift over time ,keep an eye on any changes to implementation or definition in Lighthouse’s Changelog report.
Cumulative Layout Shift
Do you have the experience of the elements of a layout shifting after content settled in the browser and start moving until the last second, when it came fully in place? Given that layout shifts are a bad user experience, Google takes into consideration sites with poor CLS scores ranking them lower than others – which explains why focusing on boosting your CLS scores is so important.
Just like with LCP and FID scores, a good CLS score is at or below 0.1. A layout that doesn’t change as people load your page, or at least not in a way that shocks them or leads them astray. It doesn’t take much effort to optimize this metric once you know what generates it, and you can likely do it yourself, or call your web developer for help. You can use Google’s free Site Audit tool for pages that scans for common issues related to CLS, and allows you to click on each issue to get it explained and learn recommendations.
Largest Contentful Paint
The LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) metric, developed by Google, evaluates the time taken by the browser to fully render and make its largest content element above-the-fold interactive for visitors. As one of Google’s Core Web Vitals, LCP is incorporated into search-engine rankings.
LCP is of critical importance in our SEO practices because it measures the time it takes for your site visitors to access relevant information on your websites, which impacts both the user experience and the conversion rate of your website. Furthermore, LCP will be a direct ranking factor in Google search results from this spring 2021.
The LCP (Low Content Pathway) metrics differ from earlier metrics, such as the time to show the first contents, or the time to become interactive; both which are quite old school, in that they don’t take into account real user monitoring with full browser accounting for screens of all sizes, browsers, and devices, thus considerably more accurate when optimizing web pages – users typically expect a 2.5 second (or less) LCP, meaning you have to measure and optimize on a continuous basis to hit this target.
PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights tools assess the performance of a page on desktop and mobile, and deliver metrics called Core Web Vitals, which are essential to measuring user experience quality.
The score is generated a free and open-source tool for measuring the speed and quality of pages that utilises field data from the Chrome User Experience Report where real users of Chrome submit performance metrics when they visit websites; and also includes, by default, a measure on three Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
TTFB stands for Time to First Byte, which is the time that a web server responds to your request to load a web page after documents have already finished loading. TTFB is a good indicator of when third-party scripts are blocking page loading and consuming your resources. PageSpeed Insights tells us to optimise our third party scripts by minifying them, loading them lazily or asynchronously, or CDN-fising them to help with website performance.
