Who doesn’t love delving into a few new facts? Sinking your teeth into a good set of facts can satisfy the appetite for a chunk of knowledge.
But as the US sociologist and politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
So why don’t we delve into a dish of cold hard facts about Core Web Vitals and please the need to know more about the new performance metrics of Google!
Facts about Core Web Vitals
Fact 1: Core Web Vitals metrics are assessed for each webpage. However, if there is not enough data to analyze, then – according to Google’s Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller – signals from other sections of the webpage or the overall site may be used to rank a page.
Fact 2: Core Web Vitals are actually split between desktop and mobile. However, only mobile signals are used for ranking pages. Back in March, Google switched to a complete mobile-first indexing, which means that sites will be primarily judged on how they perform on mobile. This explains why they use mobile speed signals, given the indexed pages are fixed to the mobile version.
To help boost Core Web Vitals metrics, there are digital solutions to help brands set up mobile-first strategies. Digital solutions such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud, or more specifically the latest version of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, called Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA).
Fact 3: The data of Core Web Vitals comes from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX), which actually records its data from Chrome users. The metrics are assessed at the 75th percentile of users, which means that if 70% of users are in the “good” category and 5% are in the “need improvement” category, then your page is still judged as “need improvement.”
Fact 4: Core Web Vitals metrics can change over time as well as the thresholds. For example, Google has changed the metrics that are used for measuring speed in their toolkit in addition to their thresholds for what would be considered fast or slow.
For example, the weight of Core Web Vitals have shifted in importance. According to Lighthouse version 6 and 7, the Core Web Vitals were weighed the following:
- 25% – First Input Delay (via its lab metric proxy Total Blocking Time)
- 25% – Largest Contentful Paint
- 5% – Cumulative Layout Shift
However, according to Lighthouse version 8, the Core Web Vitals were weighed the following:
- 30% – First Input Delay (via its lab metric proxy Total Blocking Time)
- 25% – Largest Contentful Paint
- 15% – Cumulative Layout Shift
As you can see, Google recently shifted the importance of some metrics and controlling others; cumulative layout shift was given a much greater importance of 10%, First Input Delay increased by 5% while Largest Contentful Paint remained the same.
And so It’s entirely likely this will all change again in the future. In fact, we did some work on improving the previous metrics last year, but we need to do some work again to improve the new metrics.
Fact 5: Single page apps do not just measure a few metrics like First Input Delay and Largest Contentful Paint through page transitions. There are actually around 200 ranking factors in total.
Fact 6: As part of Google’s spring metric cleaning and setting up the Core Web Vitals, they removed the requirement of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) from the Top Stories feature on mobile. What this means is that new stories don’t have data on the speed metrics. So it’s likely that the metrics from the whole domain or a larger category of pages, may be used.
PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Core Web Vitals agencies. Contact us to see how we can work together.
