Experience metrics to be used in rankings.
Google is going to start using “Core Web Vitals” as a ranking signal for websites.
Core Web Vitals measure critical aspects of the user experience. These include load time, interactivity, and the stability of content as it loads.
Google said the changes wouldn’t happen until at least next year, and the company will give six-months’ notice.
It’s worth noting that Google uses hundreds of signals to determine rankings. It will always prioritize good content over things like Core Web Vitals. The company noted:
While all of the components of page experience are important, we will prioritize pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar. A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content. However, in cases where there are multiple pages that have similar content, page experience becomes much more important for visibility in Search.
I’ve found that much of the concern over penalizing sites that are not mobile-friendly was overblown. You can expect the addition of this new signal to be modest at first.
lifesavings.online says
you can use https://gtmetrix.com for start. it offers some good insight into the most important things. There’s almost no reason a blog shouldn’t get at least a 90/90.
3 best things that come to mind:
Serve compressed .webp images with lazy load.
Minify, combine and cache.
Stop loading unnecessary plugins on pages that you don’t need them.
There are plugins for all these. I like imagify for webp. I like phastpress for minify+combine (such an awesome newish pugin).
I like to write (browser) cache policy in .htaccess (easy to google how).
I use redis object cache and varnish cache too.
And for removing unneeded things: clearfy. Clearfy is awesome, does a ton (just don’t use enable minify+combine+cache with others IE:phastpress..)
Do that stuff and you’ll be ahead of 95%. Def backup before you start playing with caching stuff.
There’s so much more that tends to go wrong:
loading 5-6 google fonts, loading entire font awesome libraries (you can make your own with icons you use…instead of 5000), not preconnecting to resources…a lot to learn about fast pages.
Francois says
Thanks for all that info 🙂