Posted on October 19, 2021
Some of you may recall the opening lines to one of the most iconic TV shows of all time: “Faster than a speeding bullet – more powerful than a locomotive – able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.” Of course, it was the opening to The Adventures of Superman which ran from 1952-1958.
Well, you may be asking yourself what that has to do with Page Experience. In May 2020 Google introduced Three Core Web Vitals to quantify and help improve a web users Page Experience. Loading or Speed, Interactivity or Power and Visual Stability or Leap to the final page design. The Superman analogy came to mind, and we thought it was a good fit. According to Google, “Great page experiences enable people to get more done and engage more deeply; in contrast, a bad page experience could stand in the way of a person being able to find the valuable information on a page.”
MediaOne has been tracking this initiative all along and has incorporated the principles into their SEO Strategies to make sure our Destination Travel Partners are on the cutting edge of this new technology.
The 3 Core Web Vitals are:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) or Loading measures how quickly the largest block on the page loads and should be less than 2.5 seconds.
First Input Delay (FID) or Interactivity measures how quickly the page allows user interaction, a click for instance. This should be less than 100 milliseconds.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) or Visual Stability measures when page elements stop shifting around and should be .1 or less
Each of these metrics is assigned a range of speeds to determine how well a website is performing.
According to Google, “Core Web Vitals are a set of real-world, user-centered metrics that quantify key aspects of the user experience.”
The new Core Web Vitals were added to several existing metrics to quantify the overall Page Experience:
Combined, these factors consider everything a user experiences on a website to try to come up with a holistic picture of the performance of your site, as Google likes to say.
According to Google, “While page experience is important, Google still seeks to rank pages with the best information overall, even if the page experience is subpar. Great page experience doesn’t override having great page content. However, in cases where there are many pages that may be similar in relevance, page experience can be much more important for visibility in Search.”
Bottom line: Google wants to rank sites at the top of the list that users love the most.
Disclaimer: Though Google has created Lighthouse, a tool to determine how a website is performing, you will most likely need a Seasoned Developer and/or Google Partner to make the website adjustments that are required to increase the User Page Experience.
Lighthouse powers the Page Speed Insights tool which gives everyone the ability to plug in a url and see exactly how well it performs across a broad spectrum of metrics including Core Web Vitals.
CLICK HERE and plug in the url you would like to have analyzed.
So, if all this talk of LCP’s, FID’s and CLS’s has your head spinning – don’t worry. At MediaOne we’ve got you covered. We have people on staff with loads of Web Vitals experience to help you navigate the ever-changing world of Google. We can keep your site on top of the list and make it the very best it can be.