October 4, 2023

Measuring and optimizing for Google Core Web Vitals: A technical SEO guide

Collecting data on your site’s performance is the first step toward
delivering a great user experience. Over the years, Google has provided
various tools to assess and report on web performance. 

Among them are Core Web Vitals, a set of performance signals that Google deems critical to all web experiences. 

This article covers the current set of Core Web Vitals and key tips
and tools to improve your web performance to deliver a good page
experience for users.

A look at the evolution of web performance

Gone are the days when improving site performance was straightforward. 

In the past, bloated resources and laggy connections often held up
websites. But you could outperform competitors by compressing some
images, enabling text compression or minifying your style sheets and
JavaScript modules.

Today, connection speeds are faster. Most resources are compressed by
default and many plugins handle image compression, cache deployment,
etc. 

Google’s quest for a faster web persists. PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is still live on web.dev, serving as the best tool to evaluate individual page loads. 

While many feel that PSI ratings are unnecessarily punitive, it’s
still the closest we can get to how Google might weigh and rank sites
via page speed signals.

To pass the latest iteration of Google’s page speed test, you’ll need to satisfy the Core Web Vitals Assessment.

Understanding the Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics integrated into the broader page
experience search signals introduced in 2021. Each metric “represents a
distinct facet of the user experience, is measurable in the field, and
reflects the real-world experience of a critical user-centric outcome,” according to Google.

The current set of Core Web Vitals metrics include:

• First Contentful Paint
• First Input Delay (to be replaced by Interaction to Next Paint)
• Interaction to Next Paint
• Time to First Byte
• Largest Contentful Paint
• Cumulative Layout Shift 

Read more at here: https://searchengineland.com/measuring-optimizing-google-core-web-vitals-technical-seo-guide-432368

Assessing your Core Web Vitals for better UX and SEO results

One of the best ways to analyze a single webpage’s performance is to
load it into PageSpeed Insights. The view is split into a combination
of: 

• URL-level data.
• Origin (domain-level) data.
• Lab data. 
• Field data.

Read more at here: https://searchengineland.com/measuring-optimizing-google-core-web-vitals-technical-seo-guide-432368