Do you know why a medical professional might take a patient’s vitals? It’s because they need to assess the person’s general health, diagnose disease, monitor the effects of treatments, and/or calculate medication dosages.
Do you know why you should be analyzing your website’s core vitals? It’s because you want to help your site rank higher in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPS).
Google included core web vitals as a ranking factor in 2021. This means you should be examining the following three web page experience metrics that the company considers the most important:
- Largest contentful paint (LCP) measures when the main page content is displayed on the screen. This is the time during the page load when the largest page element is rendered. Contentful means that text, an image or other content was created instead of an empty box.
- First input delay (FID) typically is caused by the images and scripts that download in a non-orderly manner. This disordered coding causes the web page download to excessively pause, then start, then pause. The unresponsive behavior impacts visitors’ ability to interact with your page.
- Cumulative layout shift (CLS) is calculated by adding up all layout shifts not caused by user interaction. This analyzes the proportion of the viewpoint that was impacted by layout shifts and the movement distance of the elements that were moved.
Google includes these core web vitals in its overall evaluation of your page experience. Loading, interactivity and visual stability impact your page’s rank.
How can you improve your website’s core vital scores?
- Open the Google Search Console and click Core Web Vitals. See how the pages on your site are performing.
- Focus on the poor URLs. Google tends to punish poor URLs more than elevate good URLs.
- How you get any URLs out of the red depends on the core vital you want to improve. For instance, if you have a poor CLS score, you want to improve the stability of the pages as they load.
Does your website need improvement?
Let BARQAR’s team of creative strategists and designers construct a compelling, engaging experience that helps you rank higher in search engines. Contact us today!
