All you need to know about the Core Web Vital 2024

1. Introduction 
2. What are Core Web Vitals? 
3. New in Core Web Vital 2024 
4. Three pillars of Core Web vitals 
5. Impacts of Core Web Vital on SEO in 2024 
6. Quick Tips to Improve your Core web Vitals 2024 

All you need to know about the Core Web Vital 2024 

Nobody enjoys a slow website that takes hours to open. We all just click back and prefer to jump to the next link that looks clickable, serving the purpose.   

But guess what? It’s not just you and me, Google hates it too!  

That is what Core Web Vitals is all about. Google is doing everything it can to make the user experience seamless, quick, and stable for any site on the web, keeping them happy and coming back for more. And Web Vital is one such initiative.   

So now you know it’s nothing complex but a website report card that tells how user-friendly and interactive it is.  

But rather, what needs immediate attention is the new update from Google: the release and incorporation of Core Web Vitals (CWV) into Google search rank algorithms. Business owners, marketers, or developers have no option but to get it aligned and optimized to ensure the long-term success of their website.   

Before we jump to what the update is all about, let’s get to the basics first.  

1. What are Core Web Vitals? 

Developed by Google, it’s a subset of factors that are part of Google’s page experience score.   

Simplifying, Core Web Vitals is a set of standardized metrics used to measure a web page’s overall experience in visual stability, interactivity, and speed or loading performance.   

These metrics are part of Google’s broader initiative that provides unified guidance for quality signals crucial for delivering a great user experience. Google incorporates these metric scores into its decisions about which pages to display in search results.   

Optimizing and improving the score of these metrics not only helps render a better user experience but also helps your website rank higher in search results. That is, the better a page performs in terms of these metrics, the better it is for users.  

That’s obvious and true: visitors spend more time on sites that respond quickly and interact well with queries. This means lower bounce rates. That is exactly why this is considered a crucial ranking factor for search engine optimization (SEO).  

2. Three Pillars of Core Web Vitals 

 Now let’s talk about the three pillars of CWV aka metrics of Core Web Vitals. These include: 

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures loading speed. And pages should occur within 2.5 seconds.
2. First Input Delay (FID), which measures page interactivity.  
3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which measures visual stability. And pages should have a CLS of 0.1 or less. 

Google also has the fourth one, which is now the third and last after the recent update: 

1. Interaction to Next Paint (INP), measures page responses to interaction. And pages should have an INP of 200 milliseconds or less. 

And this is what the newest Core Web Vitals 2024 is all about INP and FID.  

3. New in Core Web Vital 2024  

In March 2024, Google announced that INP (Interaction to Next Paint) concluded as the fourth pillar will replace FID First Input Delay. It’s worth pointing out how INP quickly evaluates a page’s response to interaction, which can be measured in milliseconds. Commendable!  

On the contrary, First Input Delay (FID) measures how quickly the first user interacts with something on the website. It’s all about that initial response time.   

As already mentioned, for a speedy and responsive experience, INP needs to be 200 milliseconds or less. And if it is between 200 and 500, you have some work to do to improve your site’s interactivity!   

An INP greater than 500 milliseconds represent a bad end-user experience. This translates into significant response time lags or delays encountered while interacting with the system.  

So, in short, here are the key updates on Core Web Vital 2024:  

New Metric introduced: Google introduced INP in place of FID to measure other aspects of the user experience, such as page load time and content rendering.  

Improved Algorithm: The algorithm used to evaluate Core Web Vitals scores became more sophisticated, considering more factors and providing more accurate results.  

Increased emphasis on user experience: Google will continue to count user experience first in its ranking algorithm, making Core Web Vitals scores even more critical for SEO.  

4. How Core Web Vital Impacts SEO in 2024  

Core Web Vital is not a new player in the SEO game. CWVs aren’t just a fad, they’re a big deal for your website’s ranking in search results.   

However, CWVs aren’t the only factor that determines your ranking. Content quality and being mobile-friendly remain king. Think of Core Web Vitals as if they were just puzzle pieces that fit together to produce this great SEO masterpiece. So, let’s quickly run through the impacts that SEO witnesses on Core Web Vitals:  

Better User Experience: Core Web Vitals measure how to improve user experience through faster load times, interactivity, and visual stability. Sites optimized for CWV will retain users and have lower bounce rates.  

SEO: Google includes CWV in its ranking algorithm, so sites that score well on these metrics will rank higher in search results. This leads to increased visibility and organic traffic.  

Conversion Rates: Page performance can impact conversion rates extremely. Users will engage and act on sites that load fast and provide a seamless experience.  

Competitive Edge: Businesses that focus on Core Web Vitals are ahead of the game. By doing so, they meet Google’s standards and exceed user expectations, which means they are already first than their competitors.  

Future Proof: As Google continues to put user experience in its ranking criteria, it focuses on CWV’s future-proof websites against algorithm updates. Continuous improvement in these areas will keep websites sustainable and relevant.  

5. 9 Tips to Improve Your Core Web Vitals 2024  

1. Optimize your images based on web-friendly image formats to improve your LCP (Largest Contentful Paint). Use compression techniques (like JPEG or WebP) and resize images to appropriate dimensions before uploading them. 
2. One widely used practice to seek improved page loading speed and user experience is delaying the loading time of images and video. Goggle usually suggests having this feature on the lower part of the web page or “below-the-fold” page   
3. Improve server response time to improve LCP. For your information, this is the time it takes for your server to generate the content. Consider optimizing your server software, upgrading your hosting plan, or using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver content faster. 
4. Minify the render-blocking resources like scripts, stylesheets, and HTML imports that block or delay the browser from providing the content. For this, try inlining CSS for the above-the-fold content, allowing the content to load quickly. Additionally, using the “defer” or “async” attributes for non-essential JavaScript allows the page content to load faster without waiting for these scripts, improving the overall load time and LCP score. 
5. Enable page caching, which allows your page to be stored on the server locally. So, the next time the visitor returns, the page gets loaded faster by retrieving it from the browser cache instead of opening it from the beginning. 
6. Reduce Redirects: Reduce the number of redirects on your website as they lengthen page loads and create extra round trips. Make sure internal links are up-to-date and lead directly to the intended destination. 
7. To improve your CLS, add size attributes to the media. Usually, when elements like images, banners, or ads load, these attributes without dimensions push other content down or to the side. Hence, to avoid such layout shifts, prefer setting width and height attributes for your elements. This helps maintain layout stability across various devices. 
8. The first issue with fonts is that those web fonts can be heavy and cause a layout shift when loading, which will negatively impact the CLS score. Optimizing Fonts: Use no more than 1 or 2 fonts across your site and preload them for faster delivery. 
9. Something that can hurt your Interaction with Next Paint is extensive or complex JavaScript code. Well, this is what makes your website interactive, involving JQuery and tracking scripts like Google Analytics. Minimizing the main thread work and offloading heavy JavaScript computations keeps the main thread free, responsive, and available for interaction. 

Wrapping up: 

Not the sole determinant, but Core Web Vitals are a big and growing one with user experience implications. It has a confirmed impact on the ranking, which means a poor Core Web Vitals score can negatively affect the ranking of your page on the Google search engine.   

Optimizing Core Web Vitals requires a holistic approach that incorporates both technical and strategic elements. But as the Google Core update suggested, it is not about creating an experience for the search engine but for the users. So, the best way to future-proof your website against Google updates is to improve core web vitals.