Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals was introduced by Google in 2020 and you will also see it referred to by its abbreviation CWV. In Danish, they have chosen to translate it to "Important web statistics", which is probably a slightly half-baked translation, but not wrong. Because important they are.

In order for Google to rank your site in the search results, your site must have some kind of score. Google needs to find out where among the ten results your page should be. To this end, Google has introduced a number of parameters that they measure your site on. These include page speed, page semantics, whether the page has SSL and many, many more parameters.

In 2020, Google announced "Core Web Vitals", which is an overall state of health for your site.

Imagine you have two pages that load equally fast and have similar content. On the content, there are ten links to other resources. At first glance, they would appear to be equally good. But on the one hand, 5 out of the 10 links are broken, i.e. they lead to dead pages or 404 pages. Here, Google will take this into account in the overall assessment of the two pages and the page with valid links will get a higher Core Web Vitals than the other. And so it is on many parameters. Unfortunately, only Google knows them all, but you can probably guess some things that affect it in a positive direction.

You can try it yourself with these questions:

• Do you think a fast or slow page is best?
• Do you think it's best to have many or few broken links on the page?
• Do you think it's good or bad that the text is written with such low contrast that visually impaired people can't see it?
• Do you think it's good or bad that the buttons are so small they're hard to hit on a mobile device?
• Do you think structured data is good or bad?

It's pretty straightforward, right?

So overall, make sure your site is responsive, fast, semantic, accessible and just overall good. Then you will be in good health and your Core Web Vitals will be high/good.

What do Core Web Vitals consist of?

In essence, Google describes that it consists of three things:

• LCP
• CLS
• FID

It goes without saying, right? :-)

In short, it's like this:

LCP stands for "Largest Contentful Paint". It's a measure of how long it takes to display the element on the page that takes up the most space. This could typically be the largest image on the page.

CLS stands for "Cumulative Layout Shift" and basically indicates whether the elements move around on your page as the page loads.

FID stands for "First Input Delay" and indicates the time it takes from the user interacting with your page (e.g. clicking on a link) until the browser responds. Obviously, you want a very fast response from the page.

These are some of the cornerstones of Core Web Vitals. It's a vast topic and you won't be able to solve it without a web developer by your side.

To get a basic picture of your site, you should run a Google Lighthouse test of the site.

Can I read more about Core Web Vitals at Google?

You can...

The most comprehensive page about Core Web Vitals can be found here: https://web.dev/vitals/.

Google also has a support page with it here. Usually, however, their support pages are not that crazy well explained.

We also highly recommend watching the video here for an understanding of Core Web Vitals and SEO.

We know online marketing in Shoporama

We've been working with online marketing ourselves for decades. As the only shop system in the country, we have spoken multiple times at conferences such as Marketingcamp, SEOday, Shopcamp, Digital Marketing, E-commerce Manager, Ecommerce Day, Web Analytics Wednesday and many more.