| 24 min |
Google Page Experience Update: What’s Behind It?
What are Core Web Vitals?
How does Google measure Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals 1×1 – You should know these components
Do Core Web Vitals have an impact on SEO?
Why do you need Core Web Vitals SEO optimization?
Conclusion – Page Experience Update and Core Web Vitals
FAQs
Rarely before has an algorithm change been announced by Google so early. But now it is getting closer: The Page Experience Update and the newly introduced Core Web Vitals. Have you already prepared your website well enough through search engine optimization to avoid being the loser? We will do the check with you!
Google has announced it for quite a long time: The Page Experience Update. It was introduced in June 2021. But what is behind it? The upcoming update rearranges the composition of ranking factors. One consequence of this may be a complete reordering of the search results. Google has a clear goal in mind: user-friendliness is to be improved, usability simplified and security increased. But that is not all. One buzzword comes up particularly frequently in connection with the Page Experience update: performance. Until now, this factor was difficult to measure. However, with the help of the Page Experience Update and the Core Web Vitals it contains, this is set to change.
Google has announced that the rollout of the update will be pushed back a bit. Therefore, the Page Experience Update and the introduction of Core Web Vitals are not expected until mid-June, instead of May as announced at the beginning. It also follows that it won’t be completely live until around the end of August.
The reason for the postponement: Google wants to give webmasters a little longer to fine-tune.
In detail: The Page Experience update is intended to help better map website performance. Google deals with the problem that the performance of different pages cannot be measured with the existing metrics. Performance is therefore (as of now) not clearly measurable. This makes search engine optimization more difficult. But this is supposed to change with the Page Experience update. The update includes these four already existing signals:
But that’s not all. Originally, these metrics were supplemented by PageSpeed. This is where the Core Web Vitals come into play, making PageSpeed more tangible. The reason for this is that the components of the Web Vitals can be better documented and are easier to track. The metrics defined here are thus intended to make the performance of a website quantifiable.
It is not yet clear what the weighting of the individual components will be. What is certain, however, is that the four “old” key figures will be combined with the Core Web Vitals to form a new ranking factor – the Page Experience. This will therefore be particularly important for future search engine optimizations.
With the help of the Core Web Vitals, Google wants to create uniform quality signals. These are intended to quantify the user experience with a website in order to enable comparability and identify optimization potential. In this way, Google wants to improve the usability of websites on the web. Core Web Vitals, as a component of the page experience, will be a new ranking factor in the future. In plain language, this means: If you have understood the Core Web Vitals and optimized your website for the other areas of the Page Experience, you also have a good chance of better organic rankings.
To use the Core Web Vitals metrics, Google accesses two different sets of data:
The difference between the two data sets is easily explained. While field data comes from real users and their interactions with websites, lab data is collected under perfect and consistent circumstances. They show how potential visitors might experience and perceive your website. This in turn can lead to different end results depending on the dataset used.
Google’s statement on this is as follows:
„Field data is coming from real users, whereas lab data comes from a quite strong machine with probably good internet from somewhere around the world. So you might not see the same results.“
| DATA BASIS | ADVANTAGES | DISADVANTAGES | |
|---|---|---|---|
| LABOR DATA | Collected simulated data from potential users from a controlled environment with predefined circumstances (e.g., user’s device and network settings) | – Creation of reproducible results – Creation of a debugging environment – Better verification of the effects of optimization measures | – No recording of bottlenecks – No correlation with business or site KPIs – Target group and their behavior must be understood in order to interpret data correctly |
| FIELD DATA | Collected real data from real users’ experiences with real websites | – Capture of real actual conditions incl. bottlenecks – Correlation with business and site KPIs – Ranking relevant data | – Restricted key figures – Limited debugging function |
The reason why Google uses different data sets is simple: The actual performance can be influenced by parameters such as the end device or the network connection of the website visitor. However, in order to be able to assess the performance of the page as accurately as possible, laboratory data is also used in addition to the field data of real users.
But it’s not necessarily important for you to know how Google collects the data. Instead, you want to know how you can measure the metrics yourself. Google has already done good preparatory work for this in 2020. The in-house tools are mostly prepared for the Page Experience update. For this reason, measurements of the Core Web Vitals are already possible via all popular Google tools. The following overview helps you to find the right tool for the appropriate metric:
The tools are also divided into lab tools and field tools. Lighthouse, for example, uses lab data, while the Chrome UX Report is based on field data. PageSpeed Insights, on the other hand, uses both.
Even though the Chrome User Experience Report is not a real tool, but rather a data source, it is important for Core Web Vitals. It shows you what the user experience of real, anonymized Chrome users is like with different websites. Meanwhile, Google has also added Core Web Vitals here, as it is the new benchmark for evaluating user experience. The UX Report uses aggregated data, which you can view via the following tools:
Until now, you could always test the performance of a website with PageSpeed Insights. The tool distinguishes between performance on mobile and desktop devices and gives you clear optimization recommendations. A blue flag has been added for the Core Web Vitals. This means that tool users can see directly which measured values are important for this.
The Google Search Console gives you access to field data. With its help, you can access the Core Web Vitals report, for example. This allows you to see how well your pages are doing in terms of performance and identify those that need extra attention.
Chrome DevTools is a whole set of web developer tools. So you can diagnose problems faster. You just want to do a quick check and see how your site is performing? You can do that very quickly with the DevTool Measure. Here you also get a direct insight into the Core Web Vitals, which are marked with a blue flag, just like in PageSpeed Insights.
Lighthouse helps you improve the quality of your websites. The tool accesses lab data and creates audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO and more. This way, you can identify issues in various areas and improve user experience. Core Web Vitals are also implemented here. This gives you important diagnostic information that you can use to draw conclusions about your site and appropriate optimizations. Lighthouse is also available as a Chrome extension.
The Chrome extension “Web Vitals” can be downloaded from the Chrome Web Store here. It allows you to detect problems early and evaluates the three Core Web Vitals metrics in real time.
Of course, there are other tools besides Google tools that you can use to gain insight into Core Web Vitals metrics.
Sistrix has added a new feature to the tool as part of the Page Experience update. You can access the “Core Web Vitals” tab via the Structure area. This then shows you an overview of the various measured values. In addition, it shows you a graphical progression over time for all three Core Web Vitals metrics. The values are divided into three colors according to your performance. These are based on the predefined values from Google (you can find more details in the next section).
Also, the Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool provides you with insights into Core Web Vitals metrics.
A closer look at the Core Web Vitals reveals that they are composed of three different components:
There is a reason why this metric is split into three parts: On the one hand, it has long been very difficult to measure when and how quickly a page is fully loaded or how it performs. This should now be simplified by splitting it into the above-mentioned areas. On the other hand, it is easier for webmasters to recognize which part of their website needs more attention and should be optimized.
When is the main content of the website loaded? This question is addressed by the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric. The value indicates how high the render time of the largest image or text block of the website is.
If you want to provide your website visitors with a good user experience, an LCP score of under 2.5 seconds is perfect. This means that users can see the main content of the page within this time. Google recommends keeping at least 75% of all measured LCP values in the green zone. If you achieve this goal on both mobile and desktop, your site has a good LCP score.
Google considers the following to calculate the LCP:
All the above components are included in the size in which they are also displayed to the user. Margins, borders or similar configurations via CSS are disregarded.
FCP, also First Contentful Paint, is the term for the first element the user sees when loading a website. Unlike LCP, however, this can be a loading animation, a placeholder, or something completely uninteresting to the user. The following examples illustrate the difference:
In all three examples, you see the largest content at the respective time framed in green. This changes in the course of the loading process and does not necessarily always have to be the image of a page (see example 1). Here you can see that all single images are smaller than the text block itself. Thus the images are subordinated to it.
The FCP is therefore already measured when the user can see even a single element on the page. The LCP, in turn, is only reached when the largest element of the page is loaded. The background is as follows: Google assumes that the largest element is also the one that provides the user with the greatest added value.
These tools will help you to analyze the LCP:
You can take a closer look at field data for your site using the following tools:
How long does it take for a user to interact with the website or for the site to respond to the user’s first input? This time span is measured with the help of FID, the “first input delay”. This gives you an idea about the interactivity and responsiveness of your website.
A good FID score is less than 100 milliseconds. This means that the website does not need more than the aforementioned 0.1 seconds to be ready and responsive for the first user input, both on mobile and desktop. Google sees room for improvement up to 0.3 seconds. However, anything that takes longer will result in a poor user experience. Thus, anything that takes over 100 milliseconds should be optimized.
The first impression is crucial – whether in reality or in virtual life. If there are delays here directly, this affects the user experience with the page. In addition, the first impression is a large part of the overall impression. As a result, many users draw irrefutable conclusions about the quality and reliability of the website.
Another important point is that the biggest interactivity problems often occur when the page is loading. That’s why it’s important to measure how well things are going at this point, and ideally where improvements need to be made. If you improve these first seconds, it will have a big impact on the overall interactivity of your page and put your website visitors in a positive mood.
FID primarily measures input events. These include discrete actions, such as:
Scrolling and zooming are again continuous actions. Therefore, they are not included in the FID metric.
Google has also already integrated this metric into some in-house tools. You can get your field data here:
Who doesn’t know it: A website loads, you want to click a button and – poof – the complete page content shifts and you press something else in the worst case.
This kind of instability on the page negatively affects usability and user experience and leads to annoyance for your website visitors. To assess how much your page is affected by this type of unexpected shift, there is a metric called Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). This is used to measure the visual stability of a page. This includes not only button shifts, but also shifts of images, videos, text blocks, etc.
The CLS score is calculated as follows: The affected portion of the website (affected area) is multiplied by the percentage of shift. The resulting percentage value is the CLS.
A good CLS score is achieved with a percentage shift of less than 10%. However, if the content shifts by more than 25% after the page has fully loaded, there is an urgent need for optimization.
Shifts that are triggered by the user himself, so-called expected shifts, are not problematic in principle. Therefore, they do not have a negative effect on your CLS.
Google reacted to feedback from webmasters by adjusting the CLS metric – the company now announced this in a statement on the Web.dev blog. The time of session windows, which are used to measure the shifts, is now limited to five seconds. The time between windows is one second. A session starts whenever a layout shift occurs. It ends when no shift has occurred for a certain time. As a result, the individual layout shifts are grouped together. This is to enable an intuitive merging.
If you notice unexpected layout shifts, you should take action. Google recommends three specific points that will help improve your CLS score.
To find out the CLS value, both field tools and laboratory tools can be used. These are available to you:
Field Tools
Lab Tools
The answer to this question is quite clear: Yes! But with a simple yes, the answer is not yet complete – there is more to it. Like all ranking factors, Page Experience has an influence on the positioning in the search results. But it’s not going to be the new non-plus-ultra ranking factor – even though that’s all the buzz in the Google universe right now. Core Web Vitals in combination with existing User Experience signals are important, no question. But they only look at technical aspects of a website. Content and keywords are nevertheless significantly involved in the position on which your page ranks on the SERP. This means that in practice your site can rank well even with poor page experience signals. However, if it is in competition with a similarly relevant website with better page experience values, the latter will receive the higher ranking. This is why Core Web Vitals are essential in search engine optimization. The logic behind this is quite simple: the more ranking signals you can serve well, the better your ranking.
Google’s Gary Illyes posted the following statement about it on Reddit:
“Like any other search engine, Google works hard to provide the highest quality and most relevant results for users’ search queries. CWV has nothing to do with either of those, not even remotely, so it’s highly unlikely that CWV would ever become ‘the primary driver of organic traffic.’ But that doesn’t mean CWV can be ignored.”
Slow pages, content that shifts or doesn’t respond – these are all issues that drive users crazy, especially on mobile devices. However, since access via mobile has been increasing for years, it is becoming more and more important to optimize websites for this. By 2020, 80% of all internet users were already browsing the web on a mobile device. Core Web Vitals are designed to do just that: They measure the user experience of pages and therefore have a major impact on mobile rankings, at least initially. Before the newly introduced Core Web Vitals, the following signals were relevant for this:
With the Page Experience update, these are now combined with the Core Web Vitals to form a new ranking factor. So, in order to stand out from your competitors, in addition to informative and high-quality content, you should also make sure that the technical aspects are right. In addition, right now is still a good time to carry out optimizations. Current data from the Chrome UX Report shows that only about 22% of all domains reach the recommended Core Web Vitals values.
The Chrome User Experience Report includes real user data in its analysis, which Google uses to evaluate the page experience. Google refers to different domains as origins.
A new study by Searchmetrics also shows: More than 97% of all websites studied do not achieve satisfactory Core Web Vitals results in German desktop search. In mobile search, it is 85%. All these sites thus risk ranking losses from the introduction of the Core Web Vitals score in June. Two million websites in the top 20 Google search results in Germany, the USA and the UK were analyzed.
With the Page Experience update and the introduction of the Core Web Vitals, Google takes another step towards user-centricity. This update makes it clear that the search engine giant wants to cater more to the needs of its users. Thus, it subtly makes webmasters improve their own pages to that effect. This affects pages that already provide value-added content and rank well, as well as pages that have had difficulties ranking so far. Therefore, if you have optimized your site for the three measures of Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID and CLS), this will increase your chance of good rankings in the search results.
The Page Experience update was originally supposed to be introduced in May 2021. Google already announced this in 2020. In a new statement, however, the group has now scheduled the update for mid-June 2021. From then on, the ranking factor Page Experience will also apply.
The easiest way to view the Core Web Vitals values of your site is via the Google Search Console. Here you can use the Core Web Vitals Report to gain insight into the performance of your website.
Network connections, viewport size, and devices used affect the field data that is collected for a page. As a result, the corresponding values may be different.
The basis of Core Web Vitals is data from actual user visits. These are always influenced by the users’ environmental conditions and their interactions.
Lighthouse, on the other hand, is a tool that collects lab data. That is, it simulates the process under constant conditions. Thus, at a given point in time, Lighthouse can provide information on what the data looks like for some users and what opportunities for improvement exist. However, this may differ from the data collected based on actual user visits. Hence the difference with the Chrome UX Report.
Yes, because it doesn’t matter which browser you use. Page Experience ranking signals based on Core Web Vitals can be found globally for all browser types.
Image optimizations, cleaned caches, compressed fonts and the use of a CDN (Content Delivery Network) can help you improve the performance of your website and can optimize negative influences of your CMS.
The Cookie Banner can make your CLS values look worse – but it doesn’t have to. Cumulative Layout Shift measures shifts that are unexpected and thus worsen the user experience. However, a cookie banner is not unexpected. A user visiting a new page should also expect that he/she will be shown a Consent banner to confirm cookie settings.
Nevertheless, when designing the banner, you must make sure that it overlays the content and, at best, covers it instead of moving it.
The measured field data actually includes both scenarios. In principle, all possible scenarios that an actual user might encounter with the website are mapped.
Google released the following statement: “The Page User Experience update introduces a new signal that our search algorithms use alongside hundreds of other signals to determine the best content to display in response to a query. In doing so, our systems continue to prioritize pages with the best overall information, even though some aspects of the user experience of the page in question may not be optimal. Thus, the user-friendliness of a page does not carry more weight than attractive, relevant content. “
Google continues to use the AMP version for mobile devices here, as it does currently.
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