What the Heck is a Web Vital? Joran Koene // Searchmetrics

Quotes

• “Recently about a month ago, Google released a set of updates around web vitals. Essentially these are metrics that measure the health of your site and can tellyou if you are really performing in a way that your users would expect in both mobile and desktop experiences.” -Jordan

• “A web vital is really nothing more than a KPI. Its a metric to understand the quality of the user experience of your page and it has certain subsets to it. Its about helping webmasters better understand, on a metric basis, how users are engaging with their page.” -Jordan

• “Google has gotten to the point where they are scientific about user experience and they are not being subjective anymore. There are certain metrics that they want you to abide by and ensure users can experience on your pages.” -Jordan

• “This goes beyond site speed. Site speed is a very binary metric. Think of this, if you are athlete, its more of how a coach critiques a runner on the style of running that they have. It is about the way you run and not just how fast you are.” -Jordan

• “There is a variety of reasons that your web vitals can go down. Google is monitoring these through the Chrome experience and it can be a factor of changes that youve made to your layout, changes that you made to your templates, changes that you made in terms of the stack that you are using, like the technology or platform you are using.” -Jordan

• “Google has three different KPIs that they look at and consistently monitoring to make up the web vitals. They are LCP (Largest Content for Paint), FID (First Input Delay), and CLF (Cumulative Layout Shift).” -Jordan

• “LCP basically measures the loading performance to provide users a good experience. Basically, your page should be loading within a certain amount of time. Its one of the KPIs within a site speed portfolio.” -Jordan

• “FID is measuring inner activity. When is it that a user can start to engage with your page. How quickly can they do something to your page, and really this should be in less than a hundred milliseconds.” -Jordan

• “CLF is looking at the stability on your page and how good the experience is,on the pages. This is probably the trickiest of the three and is fundamentally measuring more aspects around how well your page is maintained in terms of its ability to be interactive.” -Jordan

• “Basically, they are looking at the distance between various experiences on the page and then what kind of input function is required on that page to see if the page is actually kind of usable.” -Jordan

• “Fundamentally, the experiences on mobile are totally different from the desktop. Google is looking at these two experiences separately and using different calculations for them.” -Jordan

• “Without doing a ton of analysis that is where I would start doing your first basic triage. It is looking at how certain elements, images, graphics, headers that you have put on your site may be driving down the user experience in the CLS and then also the load time in your LCP.” -Jordan

• “I think that a lot of webmasters, they start with a certain design and experience in mind and now that we are moving into this world where Google is measuring some of these factors, we have to start to tweak our notions of simplicity and expectation for all users on all devices.” -Jordan

• “As SEOs, we need to start thinking about more than just keyword optimization or queries. We are lookingnow at the website functionality or the technical part. We also have to start thinking about the design of the website and how does that manifest itself of its utility towards the users.” -Ben