What Do Core Web Vitals Mean in Google Search Console?

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October 25, 2023

Core Web Vitals is a set of factors that Google considers important in a webpage's overall user experience. These Core Web Vitals are made up of three specific page speed and user interaction measurements:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures the loading performance of a webpage. To provide a good user experience, the LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.

First Input Delay (FID): This measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have a FID of less than 100 milliseconds.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.

To improve these metrics and, thereby, your website's overall performance, you can use the Google Search Console. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to do so:

Step 1: Access Google Search Console

First, log in to your Google Search Console account. If you don't have one, you'll need to create it and verify your website ownership.

Step 2: Locate the Core Web Vitals Report

On the left-hand menu, find the 'Experience' section and click on 'Core Web Vitals.' This report will show you how your website is performing in terms of LCP, FID, and CLS.

Step 3: Understand the Core Web Vitals Report

There are two tabs in the report: one for mobile and one for desktop. Each one will show three types of URLs: 'Good URLs,' 'Needs Improvement,' and 'Poor URLs.' These are categorised based on how they perform in terms of LCP, FID, and CLS.

Step 4: Identify Issues

Click on each category (good, needs improvement, poor) to understand more about the URLs that fall under them. You can see how many URLs are affected by each type of problem (LCP, FID, or CLS) by clicking on each issue.

Step 5: View Detailed Reports

Clicking on a specific issue will take you to a page with a more detailed report. Here, you can see examples of the affected URLs and what is causing the problem.

Step 6: Address Issues

Once you've identified the problem areas on your site, you can work on improving them. This could involve optimising your images, reducing JavaScript execution time, or minifying your CSS.

Step 7: Validate Fixes

After you've made changes to improve your site's performance, you can ask Google to validate your fixes. It may take a few weeks for Google to reassess and update your report.

Step 8: Monitor Regularly

Check the Core Web Vitals report regularly to ensure your site maintains a high standard of performance. If new issues arise, you'll be able to catch them early and address them.

Remember, improving your site's performance is a continuous process, and it can take time to see results. Keep refining and improving your site to provide a better user experience. If you need help improving your core web vitals, be sure to contact us as we offer enterprise speed optimisation either in conjunction with an SEO campaign or standalone core web vital improvements.