Did you know that there is more to your website's search engine optimization than just the words on your web pages? It's true! While using the right keywords and correct formatting are essential for driving traffic to your website, there is an often-overlooked component to your website success: Your website's speed. To improve user experience, Google measures the speed of your website to help determine how high it should rank your site. This blog will explain what Google Core Web Vitals are and how to assess your website's score. 

What Are Google Core Web Vitals?

What are Google's Core Web Vitals? There are three: largest contentful paint (LCP), first input delay (FID), and cumulative layout shift (CLS). Each is unique but measures the basic performance characteristic of your webpage. Each of these core web vitals is designed with the user experience in mind. Nobody likes to wait around for a slow website, which is why Google will now reward websites that can fulfill user expectations.

Largest Contentful Paint

LCP measures how long it takes your website to load the largest visual element above the fold. The fold is the area of a web page below the view of the screen where you have to scroll to see. Your website needs to load in under 2.5 seconds to be considered good. A load time of between 2.5 and 4 seconds is considered to need improvement, while a sub 4 second load time is poor. Speeding up your largest contentful paint will give your website visitors a more enjoyable time and help boost your website's ranking from Google.  

First Input Delay

FID is pretty straightforward. This metric measures how long it takes for your website to respond after a visitor interacts with it. Let's say you navigate to a website then press the about tab in the navigation bar. It should take less than 100 milliseconds for that website to respond to your input. Speeds of 100-300 ms need improvement. Anything less is inferior and sure to get to be a bad mark against your website. Web-users like a seamless experience, and Google intends to provide that with the first input delay metric.

Cumulative Layout Shift

CLS measures how much a website's features move position as the website loads in. If you've ever been about to click a button on a website and had it suddenly move and cause you to click something else, you'll be familiar with what CLS is trying to fix. This web core vital is considered the hardest of the three to optimize for. When creating a web page, it's important to give each element adequate space so that the page does not shift as it loads. A layout shift of 0.1 inches is good, while anything less than 0.25 inches is poor. 

How to Find Your Website's Core Web Vitals Score

Now that we've covered what Google Web Vitals are, you may be wondering how to find out how your website scores. Luckily, that part is easy. At Zimmer Marketing, we recommend using PageSpeed Insights. To find your website's current score, navigate to https://pagespeed.web.dev/ and enter your website's URL. For instance, one of the sites Zimmer Marketing just completed for a client, MonarkPuppies.com, scores 95% on desktop and 81 for mobile users.

Once You've inputted your website's URL, you will be able to see how your website performs in each metric of Google Core Web Vitals. You will also be able to see a separate score for your website based on whether it is viewed on a mobile device (like a smartphone) or a desktop computer. 

Ever since Google Core Web Vitals Launched last spring, website owners have been scrambling to optimize their pages to meet Google Core Web Vital standards. While potentially difficult to achieve, a high-scoring website will be rewarded with a better ranking on the search results page. And, in case you are discouraged by your website's current score, it's worth noting that even Amazon.com currently only scores an 83%. In fact, it is more difficult to speed up large websites. So if you own a small or average-sized website, you have an advantage when it comes to optimizing for Google Core Web Vitals.

Get A Fast, Reliable Website from Zimmer Marketing

If you want a new website that will measure up on Google Core Web Vitals, Zimmer Marketing can make that happen for you. Here are a few reasons to consider having a website built and hosted by Zimmer Marketing:

• Our web developers build custom, purpose-built websites (That means no junk slowing your site down).
• We design websites to load fast and appear consistently, so you'll have a killer CLS score.
• Our secure private server is extremely fast. There is no better home for your website than Zimmer Marketing.