As business owners, we need only one thing – to do more business. And for that, we need a website. But, what if you are not ranking for the keywords you are supposed to rank for? How will you sell your products? You can run ads for some time. But after that?
Well, you need to start working on optimizing your website for search engines if you care about long term growth – both on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Off-page SEO is important, yes. But on-page matters more since it directly correlates with the user experience on your site – how well your content is written, site structure, keywords optimized for (learn how to do keyword research), usability, and speed.
Now more than ever, most people are browsing the web through their mobile devices. Some people don’t even own a laptop – only a tablet or their mobile phone. To cater to this evolving generation of web users, Google has started preferring mobile-first websites over traditional websites. By mobile-first, we mean the website must be optimized for devices with smaller screens heavily over large screens.
Apart from this, there are many such page experience signals which Google takes into account before ranking a page.
Page Experience Signals
Right now, the new page experience signal measures your website based on the below factors –
- Mobile-friendliness
- Safe-browsing
- HTTPS support
- Absence of intrusive interstitials
- And Core Web Vitals
What is Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals is going to be the de facto ranking factor in the near future which, according to Google will rank websites based on the user experience on the site using data collected from real-world usage. Currently, there are three core web vitals –
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the time taken by the main content of the web page to load. Ideally, it should be 2.5 seconds or less.
- First Input Delay (FID) measures the time taken for the page to become interactive – the ability to respond to user input. Should be less than 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the unexpected layout shift of page content visually while loading An ideal measurement is less than 0.1
Each one plays an important role in measuring the site performance based on different factors that can affect the user experience on your site. In the future, Google may add or remove core web vitals. But for now, you can focus on these three alone.
How to view Core Web Vitals report
There are many ways to measure and view your website’s Core Web Vitals report. But if you are a WordPress user like me, you must go with MonsterInsights. MonsterInsights is one of the best Google Analytics plugins for WordPress. I have written a lot about it on my website. If you haven’t heard about it before (which I highly doubt), you can check out my MonsterInsights review.
It makes it easy to check out your Core Web Vitals Site Speed report from within your WordPress dashboard apart from enabling other features like scroll depth tracking, form conversion tracking, and custom events tracking. Using the report, you can keep an eye on your website’s overall performance like server response time, first contentful paint, time to become interactive, total blocking time, etc.
On top of that, MonsterInsights can also help you improve your website’s page load speed by offering a goal for each metric that you should aim for on your website. By leveraging these recommendations, you can improve your site speed and overall experience.
P.S. You might also want to check out my tips on improving WordPress performance.
While the above solution works well for WordPress users, you might be wondering what tool or software you can use for other platforms like Square, Shopify, Wix, or Weebly. Don’t worry – I’ve got you covered. You can use the below tools to measure Core Web Vitals for the platform you’re on –