How Important are Core Web Vitals in Search Console Stats

With every new release of Google Search Console, formerly known as Webmaster Tools, Google gets better and better. The new metric that every webmasters should focus on is "Google Core Web Vitals". Google started rolling out this feature on April 12, 2020.

So How Important are Core Web Vitals in Search Console Stats?

Let's check it out!

Through this post, I would be telling you these -

• What is Core Web Vitals
• Web Vitals in Search Console
• View Web Vitals Report
• How is Web Vital Score Calculated
• Why it's Important
• How to get Good URLs in Search Console
• What Google Wants

What is Core Web Vitals

The Core web vitals report tells you about how your page performs on real-world ground data. It's a user-centered metrics that tell about key aspects of user experience.

This is a measure of following dimensions relating to a web page -

• Load Time (Largest Contentful Paint): To provide good user experience the LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of the page first start load.
• Interactivity (First Input Display): Page should have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
• Stability of Content as it loads(Visual Stability or Cumulative Layout Shift): Page should maintain a CLS score of 0.1

So that's the definition of Core Web Vitals.

Core Web Vitals in Search Console

Google is bringing this report to you through the Search Console, formerly the Webmaster Tools.

Your web page speed calculations on GTMetrix or Pingdom may be misleading because their report and actual report may vary and are based on presumed conditions. The actual user's results in real-time may vary.

Only Google Search Console reports are actual because you are ranking for Google. It's the only search engine that you are optimizing your site for traffic.

How to View Core Web Vitals Search Console

Follow this -

• Open Google Search Console.
• From Overview, go to the Enhancements section. There you will find Core Web vitals. Click on it.
• This will generate a Mobile and Desktop report on how your page loads in the actual world(both separately).
• Each of the mobile Core Web vital report or Desktop Core web vital report will have these three metrics of various page speeds on your site -
  1. Poor URLs
  2. URLs need improvement
  3. Good URLs
• You can click on "Open Report" to check detailed stats.

Here is a typical report -

Let me explain in detail to you about this.

Poor URLs: Poor URLs are those articles/web pages that have a high loading speed.

Good URLs: These are the URLs that have amazing loading speed, less than 3 seconds or 4 seconds in real-time.

URLs need Improvement: Web pages that need improvements are shown here.

So this was Google Search Console Core Web vitals stats.

How is Web Vitals Score is Calculated?

The calculation and the graph results in the Search Console is based on this -

Why are Core Web Vitals Stats Important?

When Google has included that in Search Console means that Google has something planned and basically this is done to improve its search engine algorithm. As claimed by Matt Southern, core web vitals will become a ranking signal and I believe it would be. Otherwise, why would Google include that in Search Console?

Mostly pages that have bad loading speed will show into Poor URLs.

So basically Google wants to make sure that your page doesn't have a high loading speed. In other words, you should have a faster web hosting configuration.

My Experiment

A couple of days back itself I moved my site called https://nowiamupdated.com to Google Cloud. Surprisingly when I was writing this article, I noticed that all of my blog posts are showing under Google URLs. It means that it has a faster loading speed.

In the other experiment, when the update was released, Google started marking my site posts under good URLs for both desktop and mobile but just within 1 or 2 days it was moved to URL needs improvements in Core web vitals Mobile report. I was worried and I lost a few top SERP positions. Here is the screenshot of that website -

This was important to me because we got more than 80% traffic from search engines and so I had changed my schedule. Instead of writing more posts, I started focusing more on improving web page loading speed. It's clear from the above stats that I published less number of posts in May and June as compared to April and March statistics.

Finally from June 12, Google accredited by promoting them to Good URLs on mobile reporting too. So what I did -

1. Changed Hosting Plan: I came to understand that without faster hosting these stats will not improve and I will keep on losing search engine traffic. So I straightaway jumped from $5 DigitalOcean plan (1v CPU with 1 GB RAM) to $20 Digital Ocean plan (2v CPU with 4 GB RAM).
2. Premium CDN: I was already using premium Cloudflare CDN costing $20 a month. If you are not using it, then consider upgrading from free to PRO plan.
3. Implemented AMP with AMP Cache: I am using AMPforWP plugin for a long time now. In May 2020, I purchased their add-on AMP Cache and Advanced AMP Ads. With this plugin, you get an option of 'AMP TakeOver' which shows AMP page to desktop visitors too. Gone are the days that you are using Cache for desktop only. This AMP Cache add-on helped me to cache for amp pages.

You should be clear about one thing with your website now - Design or User Experience

Most visitors will like your website design but a faster web loading page is what required for better user experience. The user will leave your site if it doesn't get loaded under 4 seconds. Here you need to think like a visitor.

Now tell me what is important to you?

How to get Good URLs in Search Console!

Now you have understood why these metrics are important now and it will have a big role to play in the future, let's move on how to make poor URLs into good URLs.

Basically Poor URLs and URLs need Improvement in this report are the web pages on your site that need a speed boost. Actually this means that your site is loading slow in a real-time scenario.

With that said, it's clear that posts marked as Good URLs in Search Console will have an advantage and this could be a prime reason why you are ranking in a lower position in SERPs for your target keyword.

In order to get Good URLs in Search Console, you can implement what I have implemented -

• Changed Hosting plan
• Premium CDN
• Implement AMP
• Remove clutter links on your site pages: You can work upon to remove links from tags on posts.

With each move, you need to keep track of your website loading speed. Keep checking for your websites Google Page Insights and https://gtmetrix.com/ score regularly and figure out which moves you need to consider.

It's quite easier to bring Poor URLs to URLs need improvements but it's quite harder to get it as "Good URL".

So What Google Want?

First Google told us about building links, everyone was back of it and now Google wants your site to be faster and speed loading. Certainly, this is the new age webmaster tip that you should consider implementing straightaway.

I believe that Google wants your webpage to be faster and clear from clutter both for mobile and desktop.

Google now wants Speed!

To speed up your website on mobile, you will have to start using AMP. This means that Google hasn't given up with AMP Project. Infact it has got a bigger role to play.

So it's clear -

Get AMP, get faster URL, that's how your site will be in Google, if not expect less traffic.

I have been telling all the fellow bloggers about this for a long time. I think they will have to implement it now!

So moving forward there will be an end to cheap web hosting providers. Mark my words!

Over to You!

So what's your view on Core Web Vitals in Search Console? Let me know through a comment below.