Top Core Web Vitals and Page Experience | A Detail View in 2022

Core web vitals and page experience were a burning issue in 2021 as Google announced its page experience update to be rolling out in May/ June 2021. The announced update was for mobile users.

It took around August 2021 to launch the update across all websites. Currently, as of March 2022, Google has finally finished rolling the same update to the desktop search results started in February 2022.

Google has always been keen on offering the best experience to web users. To realize so, over the years, it has released over 200 ranking factors according to the changing nature of the web each time. Core Web Vitals and Page Experience Update are also of them.

The update is as follows:

‘Google added the core web vitals (part of page experience) to the existing search signals as a ranking factor.’

So from then onwards, the updated page experience signals list includes:

HTTP Security
Mobile-Friendliness (it doesn’t apply to the desktop)
Absence of intrusive interstitials
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
First Input Delay (FID)
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Or, in short, we can say

Page Experience = Core Web Vitals + previous UX-related Signals

Those web owners who have already optimized their website for the May 2021 update don’t need to take any action. Rather, with natural SEO services, they can maintain/ boost the page experience score to keep pace with the ranking on mobile and desktop effectively.

Thus, publishers and SEO services providers still have to look out for the core web vitals and page experience performance in 2022.

Anyway, to get an in-depth pulse on the Core Web Vitals & Page Experience, let’s start with their basics.

Core Web Vitals Vs. Page Experience

Another buzzword actually wobbled the webmasters and SEOs in 2021 is the ‘Core Web Vitals’ alongside page experience.

Though they are in use interchangeably, both of these phrases are different. It would not be wrong to say page experience has existed for a long time and previously consisted of UX-related factors. However, this time Google has added some new metrics in it, and these new metrics are the core web vitals.

So, core web vitals are a subset of the page experience signals, hence the new web performance standards.

Page Experience: Page experience simply means the user experience as to how the page interacts with the user. And to measure this experience, Google defines the metrics, aka web vitals.

An Outline on Existing Page Experience Signals

Mobile-Friendliness is a website optimized for mobile users.
Safe Browsing is for detecting and resolving security issues for a website. – Malware, Deceptive Pages, Harmful Downloads.
HTTPS security is for secure communication – Encrypting normal HTTP requests and responses.
The absence of Intrusive interstitials where intrusive interstitial is the popup, ad, and any other feature that blocks part(s) of the page.

Core Web Vitals (CWV)

The subset of the web vitals (consisting of three) measures the users’ real-time experience with an e-page. The characteristics of a web page in this subset are loading, interactivity, and visual stability.

A website needs to be user-centric to render the best user experience to real users. So google core web vitals measure the real-world user experience. Real-world refers to the field data involving human users, unlike lab data (theoretical and predefined scenarios). So a web page needs to get ‘good’ in all three core factors. This ‘good’ is the threshold of the 75th percentile for all metrics to pass the test across mobile and desktop.

Thus, web developers and website owners can follow the CWV guidelines to understand and create user experience-rich websites.

Also, the core web vitals might increase over time considering Google’s endeavours history of boosting user experience and ranking factors.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – loading

LCP metric evaluates a page’s loading speed (as perceived by users) to display the main content (largest visual element). By main or largest, it means the most prominent content blocks, images or videos, are visible. So this speed tells how faster a web user can start interacting with the site.

The ideal score for LCP is around equal to or less than 2.5 seconds, with 2.5s to 4 as an average score (improvement required). Hence, equal to 4s or more than 4 seconds is critical. Learn more about LCP with a beginner-friendly guide.

First Input Delay (FID) – Interactivity

FID metric assesses the quality of a user’s first interaction by counting the page’s time to respond to the first click. That is for how long (delay) the user has to wait for the response after clicking a link/ button on the page.

Ideal FID is equal to or less than100 milliseconds, while equal to, or more than 300ms is a poor score. The web development services can troubleshoot this delayed interactively issue to keep it less than 100ms. More about FID

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – Visual Stability

CLS measures the time a web page takes to be visually stable by aggregating all unexpected layout shifts of a webpage. In simple words, it is about the unexpected page movements while loading that should happen throughout the span of a page.

Typical scenarios include the user scrolling the page and losing the spot of presence or reading. OR the users quickly click a CTA, link, or button, and suddenly the page shifts. Eventually, the users end up in a different place from where they intend to click and navigate. Google uses CLS to measure such fluctuations in the layout that frustrate the users and hinder a page’s content usability.

The ideal CLS score is equal to or less than 0.1. The needs improvement core range from 0.1 to 0.25, while above 0.25 is a poor CLS score.

Core Web Vitals/ Page Experience and SEO

SEO devotes itself to ranking improvement. With Core Web Vitals as ranking signals, they are essential for SEO and should be a part of your SEO strategies. Given the above facts achieving a good CWV score boosts not only the search engine visibility but also the ranking. Thus, many SEO specialists have shaped their SEO services packages and strategies to makeover the websites into user-friendly web experiences.

Core Web Vitals and Page Experience Rolling Impact in 2022

This update certainly has influenced the rankings of the websites. Some have ascended to the top, while others face a ranking downfall. With the 2021 update for the mobile, a large number of websites face difficulties in comparison to the recently finished desktop update.

Statistics from different studies show:

39% out of 3 million analyzed web pages pass the Core Web Vitals metrics (the rest, 61% are below the threshold).
Websites with a higher ranking on Google result pages have lower LCP metric scores.
Many websites secure good FID scores for desktops in comparison to mobile devices.
80% of the 3 million pages pass Core Web Vitals both on Desktop and Mobile.
Out of the top 1000 websites, 70.4% of the pages get an excellent LCP score on Desktop devices. However, 60.1% earned a good LCP score on mobile devices.

CrUX (Chrome UX Report) said around 33% of websites pass the Core Web Vitals thresholds. The number is 10% more than what is in 2021. That means websites are efficiently improving their core web vital metrics and are faster than before.

Did your website get hit too?

If your website is in trouble, too, it means it has got caught in the peaks and valleys of the update.

Nonetheless, a lower-ranking doesn’t mean that your website experience is poor or you need to start from scratch. Or the page experience is overriding your website content. That also doesn’t mean you should stop focusing on the links, content, and search intent. It might be simple as websites ranking above you have a better page experience score.

Measure and Improve your Core Web Vitals

So what you do from now on is to track down your core web vitals and evaluate your page experience performance score. It will brief you on where you stand and where to start to enhance the site page experience.

A plethora of tools/ ways are available to help you evaluate your website’s core web vital performance and simplify website optimization. Also, your website development company can help improve the website in order to pass the core web vitals thresholds. In fact, the web gurus have also found the best performing CMSs (content management systems – Drupal, WordPress) for the website.

Thus, you just have to take a step forward to optimize your website, whichever facet it is lagging.

The following can help you with boosting your web vitals score

Utilize caching at the server level and browser level
Optimize the media files and website font size
Optimize the code (defer JavaScript loading, HTML, CSS styling, etc.)
Upgrade the hosting and use Content Delivery Network (CDN)

P.S. One study shows using CDN can significantly improve the overall Core Web Vitals score.

Secondly, you can start with the low-hanging fruits or simply the aspects of your website you are confident about.

So, Don’t Ignore other SEO Strategies.

As we mentioned, link, content, and search intent also call for attention while ranking. So focus on content strategy, off-page SEO, and other SEO aspects as well.

Outsource professional content writers for quality content writing services and unique yet valuable content for your website. SEO content writing services can help overhaul your on-page SEO, keeping in line with the user intent to a greater extent. In addition, keep the Off-Page SEO and social media efforts rolling alongside consistent content publishing.

Get an Expert to Help You!

You can get a helping hand from reliable SEO service companies. In addition, many one-queue web companies offer all solutions under one roof. For instance, web design and development, branding, content, SEO, and full-fledged digital marketing. Their best SEO packages come with professional content writing services, link building, website performance analytics, and core web vital improvement.

Share your questions about the website’s core web vitals performance with us!