Before starting off on the topic of why Google’s Core Web Vitals update shows the need for marketers to adapt, let’s first try to understand exactly what these Core Web Vitals or CWV are.
In short, Core Web Vitals are a set of specific factors that Google considers important in a webpage’s overall user experience.
In the past, Google's algorithm was used to identify high-quality content relevant to the search intent.
It would also check for mobile friendliness, security, and fundamental user experience indicators.
Now, with the introduction of CWV, Google is taking things to the next level. Because Core Web Vitals is now a ranking signal, and websites that do not follow best practices will receive worse ranking scores than those that do.
This has brought a significant shift in how we think about web performance.
It looks to quantify the consumer journey throughout your website instead of judging Speed on a page-by-page basis.
In Google’s CWV, there are three critical metrics that Google values the most: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
1. LCP – Largest Contentful Paint: Simply described, this is the point at which a page's main content loads. It calculates how long it takes for the page's largest visible picture or text block to load.
2. CLS - Cumulative Layout Shift: CLS assesses and measures how much the content and elements of a page change while it is still rendering.
3. FID - First Input Delay: FID is the time it takes for a user to first interact with a website until the browser reacts. In other words, when we load webpages in a browser, we normally expect the page to be ready to receive our input the second we see a visual element, such as a button, an image, or a scroll bar, load on the screen. Even though the website appears to be loading, we expect to be able to click the button or scroll down the page.
So, while original and relevant material will always be beneficial to SEO, now Google will also use these factors and consider how well visitors engage with your website when evaluating its performance.
This is where the need for marketers to adopt and use leaner technologies comes into the picture. This allows you to scale swiftly while remaining fully optimized.
So what exactly are these Lean Technologies and How can they help?
Lean Technologies, or simply "lean," is a systematic approach to reducing inefficiency in a system while maintaining productivity.
Lean technologies have helped businesses cut costs, enhance quality, and increase their revenues for a long time.
Many content-driven platforms that wish to go faster, become more flexible, and easily manage could see a benefit from going headless.
Lean Technologies primarily have 5 Principles:
- Identify Value
- Map Value Stream
- Create Flow
- Establish Pull
- Seek Constant Improvement
In the context of web analytics, if you have a brain and a website, you're probably using web analytics to learn more about your clients.
To add on further, even now, traditional, old-school metrics monitoring for standard metrics are used in web analytics.
This includes the number of visitors, how much they spent, and how long they spent on the site, etc. While there are different levels of complexity and sophistication in web analytics, it's safe to say that they are already commonplace.
On the other hand, experiential analytics is based on lean/modern technologies that analyze individual user behavior through session records, heat maps, user journey flows, warnings, and triggers, among other things.
Some of the examples of experiential analytics are:
- Did they highlight and copy the name of a product on your site to paste into Google and search for elsewhere, likely at a lower price?
- Did they look at the Frequently Asked Questions?
- Did they copy and paste the name of a product on your site into Google to look for it elsewhere, most likely at a lower price?
Their goal is to provide you with a better understanding of what site visitors did between arriving on the site and making a purchase (or not).
Lean and Optimization:
At their core, both Lean and optimization believe that every change should be tested as a hypothesis. Both acknowledge that we aren't perfect but that constant improvement will get us as close as possible to perfection.
Continuous improvement in Lean entails reducing unnecessary tasks and boosting process efficiency. Iterative testing, as well as trial and error, are used to increase optimization.
Because of their iterative approach to improvement, the two go hand in hand (and are debatably synonymous).
Lean Tech can help you Optimize Your Site's Performance for Core Web Vitals in many different ways.
It can help you:
- Improve the response time of the server
- Upgrade Your Web Server(Among others mentioned: Litespeed, NGINX, and Cloudways)
- Upgrade your web hosting service.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN).
- Use caution when it comes to server-side scripts (theme, page builder, plugins, etc.)
- Improve the Largest Contentful Preload Time of paint
- Defer JavaScript and be obsessive about every resource and asset you load.
- Remove JavaScript that is rendering-blocking.
- Make sure your typefaces are optimized.
- Make sure your images are optimized.
- Implement lazy loading by serving pictures in WebP format.
- Have an AMP website.
- Use add-ons sparingly.
- Make use of a cache plugin (even with the basic configuration).
Conclusion:
When preparing a website for a Google update, the user experience is the most crucial factor to consider.
Page Experience will be one of Google's 200+ ranking variables, and it will begin as a modest signal.
Before building any software, companies and organisations often have to decide on a structured path for their development process.
This is primarily done to ensure that the team can work with maximum efficiency and the final product is of the best quality.
Waterfall and Agile are the two main methodologies that people have found useful and have been consistently using in production environments for decades;
Google does extensive testing on search results, and considers a variety of parameters. So, if you fall short on even one of them, your site might not rank well in searches.
People frequently look at their rankings for specific words or the number of visits, but this isn't the correct statistic to use. The conversion rate should remain the most crucial measure. It’s important to select the appropriate KPIs to monitor.
Determining the impact of a difference can be difficult. The use of Leaner Technologies allows companies to retain any benchmark they had even when significant modifications were made to the website, such as a redesign, a structural change, or large-scale content changes, etc.