Core Web Vitals - A Part of Google's Page Experience Evaluation

Recently, Google provoked controversy by declaring a new ranking factor - 2021, the page experience. 

For developing the best website, user experience plays a vital role. But this time, it will become even more essential to assist you in building engaging websites for your customers. 

Let us unveil its secret: the strength of new metrics, the Core Web Vitals. 

It's time to meet LCP, FID, and CLS, the three core web vitals. 

This post will showcase Core Web Vital learning and how you can improve it for a better page experience. 

Let's kickstart our journey!

What Are Core Web Vitals? A Precise Explanation

A set of typical factors that Google considers in an overall user experience of a webpage is Core Web Vitals. 

These are made of three specific user interaction and page speed measurements:

• Largest contentful paint (LCP), 
• First input delay (FID), and 
• Cumulative layout shift (CLS).

In a nutshell, Core Web Vitals are a bunch of the factors that will take part in Google's "page experience" score, a Google's way of gauging your page's overall user experience.

Three Types of Core Web Vitals - Explanation Made Easy

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

From a user's perspective, this Core Web Vitals lets us know how long a page takes to load.

In short, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is the time a user takes to click on a link to see most of the content on-screen.

LCP is not similar to page speed measurements as various page speed metrics (such as First Contextual Paint and TTFB) fail to exhibit what it takes to open a webpage. 

On the contrary, LCP targets what actually matters concerning page speed, which lets you visit and interact with your web page. 

Google PageSpeed Insights will assist you in checking your LCP score. 

If your website's LCP score doesn't meet your expectations, you can try the below things to improve it:

• Clear the useless third-party scripts, as the recent page speed study said they slow down a page by 34 ms. 
• Update your web host to better hosting that may lead to faster load times (including LCP).
• Set up lazy loading as it makes it images-only load when the user scrolls down your page, which states that you can attain LCP faster.
• Remove the large page elements that Google PageSpeed Insights will suggest if your page has an element delaying your page's LCP.
• Lessen your bulky CSS as it can significantly slow down LCP times.

First Input Delay (FID)

Next, look at Google's second Core Web Vital, First Input Delay.

Here, at this point, your page has caught up with LCP, but are you sure that users can easily interact with your page? 

At this point, the need for FID comes into play which measures the time a user takes to interact with your page.

FID is essential according to Google as it considers how users interact with websites. And like LCP, they have typical benchmarks for what comprises an acceptable First Input Delay (FID).

Technically, FID evaluates how long elements take to occur on a page. So, concerning that, it's a page speed score. 

But, it moves a step ahead and measures the time the users take to do something on your web page.

If it doesn't fulfill your expectations, you can try the below things to improve your website's FID score:

• Reduce (or defer) JavaScript as while the browser is loading JS, it's almost impossible for the users to interact with a web page.
• Remove non-critical third-party scripts like LCP; third-party scripts (such as heatmaps, Google Analytics, etc.) can negatively affect FID.
• Use a browser cache that will help load content on your page faster, which in-turns help your user's browser load via JS loading tasks even quicker.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) lets you know how stable a page is while loading, also known as visual stability.

Or we can say, as the page loads, the elements on your page move around; then you catch up with a high CLS, that's not good.

Instead, your page elements must be pretty stable as it loads up. This way, the users wouldn't need to re-learn the location of images, links, and fields when the pages get fully loaded or users click on something mistakenly. 

You can try the below things to minimize CLS: 

• Use fixed size attribute dimensions for media like images, video, infographics, GIFs, etc. This way, the user's browser will know the exact dimensions that element will occupy on that page. And won't change it as the page completely loads.
• Ensure the ads elements hold a reserved space; otherwise, they can unexpectedly appear on the page, making content up, down, up, or to either side.
• Append new UI elements below the fold; this way, they don't take content down that the user wants to be in its space.

Other Performance Metrics

Well, the developers can use Core Web Metrics to improve websites for a better user experience. Besides, various chief metrics are there that the developers can use to influence their code and how users consume website content. 

Let's check out a few names:

• Time to Interactive
• First Contentful Paint
• Speed Index
• Page Performance Scores
• Total Blocking Time

Conclusion 

Core Web Vitals, also generally known as Google's "page experience" metric, are attempting to enhance the user experience. Be sure that the better the UX, the better the page experience score. 

So, start adopting Core Web Vitals that can help you improve your web page experience.