The importance of Core Web Vitals for Google Discover

User experience has become a pivotal factor in determining a website’s ranking on search engines.

Google’s page experience update was a gradual rollout of ranking factors from June 2021 that Google’s search systems use to evaluate a page’s user experience.

The update included several signals, including:

Core Web Vitals
HTTPS security
Mobile friendliness
Absence of intrusive interstitials
Page speed

While Core Web Vitals are not a strict requirement for inclusion in Google Discover, they play a significant role in enhancing user experience and indirectly impact your content’s performance.

Good Core Web Vitals are particularly important for publishers not serving Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), as they become crucial for delivering a fast, smooth user experience.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Let’s start with the basics.

Core Web Vitals are a set of specific metrics that Google considers essential for delivering a superior user experience on the web.

These metrics are:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures the loading performance of the largest content element visible within the viewport. An optimal LCP should be less than 2.5 seconds.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Measure a website’s responsiveness to user interactions. It observes the latency of all click, tap, and keyboard interactions throughout a user’s visit to a page and reports the longest interaction duration. A good INP score should be 200 milliseconds or below.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Evaluates visual stability by quantifying the amount of unexpected layout shifts of visible page content. A desirable CLS score is less than 0.1.

These metrics are designed to capture key aspects of the user experience, including loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.

Why are Core Web Vitals important for SEO and Google Discover?

Google has integrated Core Web Vitals into its page experience ranking signals, making them a significant factor in SEO.

Websites that perform well on these metrics are likely to rank higher in search results and have greater visibility on Google Discover compared to those that don’t.

Google aims to prioritise websites that offer a great user experience, which is often correlated with higher engagement.

Good Core Web Vitals should lead to increased engagement, a longer time on the page, and a higher likelihood of users returning to your content in the future.

While content quality remains key for Google Discover, in highly competitive niches where multiple publishers are creating similar content, having optimised Core Web Vitals can give you the advantage.

It could be the difference between your content being chosen for Discover over competitors.

How to measure Core Web Vitals

To measure your website’s Core Web Vitals, you can use various tools provided by Google, including:

Google Search Console: Offers an overview of a site’s Core Web Vitals performance.

PageSpeed Insights: Provides detailed insights into the LCP, INP, and CLS scores of individual pages.

Lighthouse: A lab tool that simulates page loads and provides actionable recommendations for improving performance.

How to optimise your Core Web Vitals

Optimise images and videos: Compress and properly size images and videos to reduce loading times. Consider using modern formats like WebP for images.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): CDNs can reduce server response times by caching content closer to users’ geographic locations.
Ensure visual stability: Use size attributes for images and videos to prevent layout shifts and reserve space for ads and embeds to maintain a stable layout during loading.
Minimize JavaScript execution: Reduce the impact of JavaScript by deferring non-critical scripts and minimizing the use of third-party scripts that can delay interactivity.
Implement lazy loading: Delay the loading of non-essential resources until they are needed, which can improve both LCP and CLS scores.
Enhance server performance: Optimise server configurations and reduce the number of requests made to the server to improve overall loading performance.