How Core Web Vitals (CWV) Helped In Improving The Search Engine Ranking Of Websites?

Core web vitals (CWV) are the set of three very important performance metrics which has helped many websites to improve their search engine ranking on Google. Google has always been very secretive about parameters they take into consideration while deciding the ranking of a website. However, in 2020, the tech giant itself announced that CWV will play an important part in the ranking algorithm of the search engine. Since 2021, these CWVs have helped many websites to improve their ranking on search engines over the competitors.

CWV is a set of three performance measurement metrics on Google.

1. Largest contentful paint or LCP which measures the loading speed of the website or the webpage.
2. First Input Delay or FID to measure page interactivity.
3. Cumulative layout shift or CLS to measure the visual stability of the page

Why core web vitals?

Apart from HTTP security, mobile friendliness, and the absence or presence of intrusive interstitials, CWV has been a significant factor affecting page ranking on Google. Any website that has made changes in its CWV after mid-2021 has seen visible improvement or deterioration, as the case may be, in its page ranking. Since the beginning, Google has emphasized positive user experience above everything else while deciding the ranking of a website. If the user is not getting a good user experience, then they may shift to some other source for information. It is the main reason why Google bots consider CWV to enhance the user experience to the user to maximum.

Search engine bots such as web crawlers and web spiders analyze the data of a website for its appropriateness before showing it as a result of any search query. If two websites A and B have similar content of similar quality, then other vitals such as CWV plays a significant role in determining the ranking of the websites. Websites offering better user experience will be above the others with compromised user experience.

Largest Contentful Paint or LCP!

LCP measures the time it takes to load the largest content of any webpage. The largest content of any page is usually an image or a big block of text, which is also the main body of the content user is searching for. Loading of the largest content is perceived as loading of the entire webpage and search engine bots need not calculate the loading time of the entire page. If an image or a large text body takes under 2.5 seconds to load, it is considered to be good. Though, the faster the speed better ranking you get for your page.

First Input Delay or FID!

FID is the measurement of the time lapse between the user’s first attempt to interact with the page and when the page starts responding to the request. If this time-lapse is 100 milliseconds or less, it is considered to be good. It is important to note FID does not measure the time taken to load the requested image or the text. It just measures how long of user clicks on an image or a button website started uploading the text or image. FID has proved to be a reliable CWV as it is measured on real users in real-time in the field rather than hypothetically in the lab.

Cumulative layout shift or CLS!

CLS is the measure of jump around or shifts in the page layout of the webpage while loading. Google has defined good CLS as less than 0.1. Too many bursts or shifts in page layout while loading of website can leave the user confused and frustrated and can result in a bad user experience.