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Core Web Vitals II: New Business Opportunities With Semalt 



At Optimization-2021 Andrey Lipattsev, Strategic Partner Relations Manager for Chrome, spoke about the autumn updates of Core Web Vitals and how businesses can use them.

Last year, the search engine announced Core Web Vitals signals - content quality assessment factors - and launched them in May 2021. Now, to do business online, it's not enough just to order a beautiful website and promote it. The website must be user-friendly. Do you want your site to rank higher? Meet Core Web Vitals quality requirements.

We will tell you what updates have taken place in the work of Core Web Vitals a year later, what tools are available for working with them, and how businesses can use these opportunities to increase profits.

What are Core Web Vitals and how do they impact businesses?



The Core Web Vitals consist of three parameters related to the convenience and usefulness of the resource for the user. They are based on criteria for evaluating the user's interaction experience with the site: positive or negative. The site should work quickly, conveniently and not hinder the user in solving his or her problem. The main measures of Core Web Vitals are the following:
Today we will focus on the changes that have taken place since its release.

In August 2021, Core Web Vitals signals were launched and working 100% in Google's mobile SERPs. Their implementation for desktop broadcasts is scheduled for February-March 2022. At the end of 2021, the site quality assessment factors received some updates. 

The number of tools for analysis has increased

Recall that with the launch of Core Web Vitals, Google immediately offered a number of tools for evaluating and correcting the site in accordance with the new quality requirements.

To recap, a business can:


The basic tool is Lighthouse. Lighthouse considers each metric (from left to right: performance, accessibility, security best practices, SEO, progressive web development standards). It then generates an overall assessment of the site's performance (Performance). However, this is not all the data that a business can get from the Core WEb Vitals of its site. 

Page Experience Signals

The Google Page Experience update includes a set of signals that show how users react to your site, whether they are comfortable with finding the content they need or not. Page convenience signals should be taken into account when promoting a site. Among them:

Google Search Console now has a report on Core Web Vitals 



Google Search Console has added a Web Core Metrics report that provides information about Core Web Vitals and a Page Experience report for your site. They provide metrics to help businesses see, for example, why users leave pages without converting.

Core Web Vitals report:

Page Experience report:



Thus, the Page Experience report complements the Core Web Vitals report with data on the number and percentage of pages marked as friendly. Also, this data can be filtered by selecting a specific period of the site. 

AMP Content Still Improves Core Web Vitals

Google has been recommending the adoption of AMP technology (Accelerated Mobile Pages) for several years now. It optimizes content to speed up page loading on different types of devices. Recall that LCP - the speed of loading the main content - is one of the main parameters of Core Web Vitals.

Google emphasizes the equality of content with and without AMP for the search engine. So, in August, the search engine removed a special icon that marked pages with connected AMP. Also, the presence of content that does not use AMP technology has been expanded in the search results. It has become more visible in the Top Stories carousel and in the Google News app. At the same time, the Helper for creating convenient AMP pages appeared - a diagnostic tool for developers.

Changing the CLS Metric Score (Total Content Shift)

The evaluation of the CLS metric often caused fair discontent among developers and optimization specialists. For example, sites have various third-party scripts that often cause the content of the page to move when the user accesses it. The developer or owner of the site does not have the ability to influence the third-party scripts, but the CLS score of their resource is decreased. In addition, the CLS metric is used to evaluate the movement of content over the duration of the user's interaction with the page. Users visit some pages for a short period of time, while others spend several minutes. Naturally, the longer the interaction time, the more time for content changes to occur.

How has the CLS metric changed? It is now measured not during the entire lifetime of the page, as was previously the case, but during five-second intervals of the page's active work. The interval between sessions is 1 second.

How can a business improve Core Web Vitals for a website?

Andrey Lipattsev at the Optimization-2021 conference gave recommendations on how to build a site analysis and improve Core Web Vitals. 
  1. Measure the health of your website with the CrUX dashboard. Please note that you only get the data that Chrome has.
  2. Review the Google Search Console page usability report.
  3. Analyze the performance of individual pages with PageSpeed Insights and get detailed recommendations for improvement.
Combining data from CrUX and Google Search Console allows you to identify key points on the site that lower Core Web Vitals. Also at this stage, it is necessary to prioritize: which specific pages or their categories should be worked on first. Further, PageSpeed Insights will provide in-depth recommendations for specific URLs, including those specific to a number of CMS and frameworks.

How does improving Core Web Vitals affect companies' KPIs?

Today, it is not enough for a business to have a well-optimized website - the business that works through this website must meet the expectations of users. You can read about user expectations and how search engines take them into account here on our blog. For businesses, the behaviour of the user at the moment when he enters the site is of the utmost importance. Core Web Vitals describes the effectiveness of the site at this very moment. 

Core Web Vitals are needed not to improve rankings, but to increase user conversions. Users who are dissatisfied with the way the site works will not solve their problems with the help of the business that owns the site. 

Conclusions