Google Core Web Vitals Update and a Badge!

As mentioned by Google on the 29th of January this year, a major Core Web Vital update to its algorithm is coming in May ’21.

Core Web Vitals are Google’s new standards for evaluating whether a page provides a good user experience.

The new metrics consist of:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures the speed at which a page’s main content is loaded. This should occur within 2.5 seconds of landing on a page.
• First Input Delay (FID): Measures the speed at which users are able to interact with a page after landing on it. This should occur within 100 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures how often users experience unexpected layout shifts. Pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.

Google offers 6 different ways of measuring Core Web Vitals, according to John Mueller from Google. As we learn from him, all minimum requirements need to be met to benefit from the upcoming algorithm update.
The ways described by him refer to 6 different tools to measure the a.m. criteria. All of these tools are with us here at Creativo.
Mueller stated:

“There are a number of factors that come together, and I think the general idea is if we can recognize that a page matches all of these criteria then we would like to use that appropriately in search ranking.
The general guideline is we would also like to use these criteria to show a badge in search results, which I think there have been some experiments happening around that.”

Not all factors are perfectly clear, and we understand that Google is still fine tuning their approach and the results after analyzing a website and matching it against the a.m. criteria.

Our SEO clients will not have to worry about anything. As part of our SEO package, we will be looking after these necessities and will make sure that all these criteria are matched. If you are not engaging in SEO and would like to know more, please reach out to us.

A batch sounds a bit childish but since Google is the Judge, Jury and Executioner (please look out for one of our next articles with this title) when it comes to modern websites, we will have to do our homework and make sure we are graded well!