There are many factors that affect website rankings, one of which is, site performance. How does your site perform in terms of speed and accessibility? Just this month Google established a new user experience metric called Core Web Vitals.
Core Web Vitals aims to put the most optimized website in terms of performance on top of the rankings for users to immediately view. With this there is a certainty that ranking would be shuffled and website owner would have to step up to improve or optimize their site’s performance. The update has been pre-announced a year ago to give website owners some time to make notable changes in their website in terms of performance.
The question is why did Google decide to shift to Core Web Vitals? According to the 2017 Google study they found that approximately 53% percent of mobile users abandons a page if it takes more than three seconds to load. This is exactly the reason why Google decided to put value on the performance and speed of a website. Which sounds right, considering the fact that regardless of how good the content of a website is, if the user leaves before viewing, it will all be for nothing.
Core web vitals is all about analyzing the performance matrix to determine how long it takes to load a site. Here are three core web vitals that website owners need to know.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – It measures when the largest content becomes visible.
- First Input Delay (FID) – It measures the time from when a user first interacts with your site to the time when the browser is actually able to respond to that interaction.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – Calculated by summing all layout shifts that aren’t caused by user interaction.
To make the necessary changes in your website you need to know first what it is exactly that you need to improve. Here are free tools that you can use to determine factors in your website that could be affecting its performance. Take note that in analyzing the result the items listed in red should be your top priority.
- Google Page Speed Insights – this analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster.
- Pingdom – helps you provide excellent service and third-party proof of meeting key service objectives and SLAs with sharable and customizable reporting.
- GTmetrix – it analyzes the speed of your site’s performance. It is a tool that allows you to see how fast your website loads.
- Euro Web Speed – A speed test running in The Netherlands.
- Thai Web Speed – A speed test running in Thailand.
With these tools, you are able to determine all the red flags that are keeping your website from reaching the target performance standards, especially in terms of speed accessibility. By meeting the standards in performance, in the end, it will surely affect your site’s ranking.