Google wants to see your best foot forward. Your website’s mobile-friendliness, speed, and overall structure are all important factors that influence how it ranks your site. A lot of SEO companies have built up around this fact. They know what pages it is looking for, so they create fake content just to fill those requirements.
However, you can easily check to make sure your website is following Google’s Core Web Vitals (GCWV). For your site to have a chance of being found by the search engine, you need to follow their webmaster guidelines. In this article, we will show you how to pass GCWV so that you can be the front-runner in getting your site discovered!
What are Google’s Core Web Vitals Metrics?
Google’s Core Web Vitals (GCWV) are some of the most important aspects of getting your site ranked. You need to have fast-loading pages, mobile responsiveness, and an HTTPS secure connection to be considered for ranking. Furthermore, having your site pass Google’s speed test is also crucial. This is because it uses site speed as a metric to measure the quality of your page.
This can be a challenge for many new sites, but once you have a working knowledge of how to properly configure these Core Web Vitals (CWV), you will have a good chance at being one of the first websites that come up when people search for keywords you target. These Core Web Vitals include:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This core vital measures the time taken for the largest content to be painted on a user’s screen while browsing your site.
- First Input Display (FID): This core vital helps identify its time to get your users on the page.
- First Contentful Paint (FCP): This core vital ensures that your content is ready early, during load time of key pages.
- Perceptual Speed Index (PSI): This metric gives a score for how quickly different sections of your site are displayed.
- Estimated Input Latency (EIL): This metric helps measure the time from when a request is initiated to when it is complete.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This metric helps the time it takes for your site to complete loading.
- Enabled Web Push Notifications (EWPN): This core vital ensures that your site is secure with an HTTPS connection.
- Latency: This tells you how quickly the first byte is received from your server, which is important for users all over the world.
As you can see, these five CWV are central components of your site’s search engine optimization. Let’s take a look at how you can test and implement each one so that your site can pass GCWV.
How to measure Core Web Vitals?
The first step to ensuring that your site passes GCWV is by checking if your site actually enforces these metrics. Using developer tools, you will easily check the speed of different pages on your site. You can also get a general idea of how long it takes for your page to load, which will help you see what areas need the most work.
Using PageSpeed Insights, you can check if your site is mobile-friendly and has a fast loading time. You may also want to test your page speed with Pingdom or GTmetrix. These tools allow you to get an accurate reading of how long it takes for your site to load and give you suggestions on making it faster.
Once you have used one of these tools, you will get a score out of 100 that shows how well your site performs in terms of user experience. You want to make sure that all areas are at 60 or higher.
What is a Good score for Google’s Core Web Vitals?
Google is always updating its search engine ranking algorithms to ensure that the highest quality sites are at the top of the rankings. This means that it will be harder and harder for your site to compete if you do not follow GCWV guidelines.
To pass, most sites need a score of 65 or higher in all speed test areas, which are outlined below. Here are some examples of what you can expect to see on your scorecard for each metric. The overall score for all five categories must be at least 60 or higher. Once you have satisfied these conditions, you will pass GCWV.
How to Improve your Score for CWV
Once you have used PageSpeed Insights or a similar tool, you will see that every single page on your site has a score for each of the five CWV. These scores are out of 100 and reflect how well your site is performing from a speed perspective.
Each individual score gives a good idea of how much improvement needs to be done in each area. To improve your scores, you need to focus on a couple of areas at a time. You can then go back and check your score after a week or two has passed.
The first area to work on is where your site performs the best. This will give you an idea of how well your site performs in general. Once you have improved this, move on to the next best metric.
This process will help you make your site faster, which benefits both your users and search engine rankings. Once all the scores are at least 60 or higher, you should start to improve your overall score by adding things like monetization features.
Now that your site is passing GCWV, you can focus on optimizing your site for both users and search engines. Security is always one of the most important aspects of optimizing your site, so make sure you are using HTTPS with an SSL Certificate to ensure that all transactions are secure.
Tools to Improve Core Web Vitals
The following tools can help you optimize your site for speed. Each one has a free version that you can use to see how fast your site is loading. You may also consider using professional software, such as GTmetrix or Pingdom, which offer a greater variety of features and insights.
- Google’s PageSpeed Insights – This is a free tool that quickly analyzes your site’s loading speed and offers suggestions on how to improve the performance of each page.
- Pingdom – This software provides a breakdown of sites into key functions that impact their speed, such as DNS lookup time, TTFB (time to first byte) and more. It also suggests methods for improving each of these metrics.
- GTmetrix – This tool offers suggestions on the best ways to increase your score, as well as insights into how other sites are achieving their scores.
Conclusion
By following the guidelines outlined in this article, you should be able to make significant gains on how fast your site loads for users. Once you have achieved a score of at least 60, you can focus on adding things like monetization features and ensuring that you meet GCWV.
