In 2021, Google’s became an . The change was fully implemented for all desktop and mobile searches in February 2022.
Google also has been working on new technologies that optimize web performance and experimenting with new metrics for performance.
What do the Core Web Vitals mean?
Three user experience metrics are the Core Web Vitals.
These metrics are collected by Google from users in the . These metrics are more important than any other. Pages with high scores rank higher in search engine results.
Priority hints can be used to accelerate your site’s speed
Chrome launched last April. This HTML feature allows website owners to identify the most valuable resources within a webpage. This feature is particularly useful when images are the Largest Contentful Paint.
All images loaded on pages are defaulted to having low priority. This is because the browser doesn’t know if an element of the webpage will be the main image or a tiny icon at the bottom.
It is common for LCP images loaded at low priority first, and later switched to higher priority. This means that the browser may take longer to start downloading the image.
The is an example. The browser is aware of the image, but doesn’t decide it needs to load it.
This problem can be fixed by adding the fetchpriority="high") attribute. This causes the browser to load the LCP image immediately after it is discovered. Largest Contentful Paint occurs much faster.
Speed tests of high quality on-site
Many site speed tools are available for free on the internet. Many site speed tools that use Google’s Lighthouse software can report inaccurate metrics due to . Google’s tool also has this feature.
To get precise performance data, you can use DebugBear’s . These reports contain both lab results as well as real data from the Google Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX).
New Interaction to Next Paint (INP metric)
The Core Web Vitals will continue to evolve and, in 2022, Google introduced an experimental new metric called . This metric measures the time it takes for a user to update the page after they interact with it.
JavaScript is often activated by user interactions. This updates page’s HTML. To display the new content, the page must be rendered by your browser.
The Interaction to Next Paint metric aims to fix two shortcomings of the First Input Delayed metric.
- FID doesn’t include the time it takes to process user input.
- FID only considers the initial interaction between users
More than 90% sites are currently performing well in the First Input Delay measurement. This is far higher than the cases for Core Web Vitals. INP could replace First Input Delay as it gives a more accurate assessment of the website’s user experience.
Safari offers better image support
The bandwidth required to download images is quite large, and browser developers are always working on improving image formats and platforms. These features are not always fully available in all browsers, unfortunately.
There has been some improvement in Safari over the past year. Safari was the first major browser to support the smaller . Safari supports native image lazy loading by using the loading="lazy” attribute.
Recognize and remove render-blocking sources
. JavaScript and CSS requests often block rendering. This means that your website will not display any content until those files are downloaded.
Google now offers better reporting tools to help site owners improve page loading times. within Chrome DevTools shows which render-blocking requests.
Keep an eye on Core Web Vitals throughout the day
Are you ready to try these ideas?
You can monitor the performance of your site continuously using a monitoring tool. This will allow you to verify that optimizations work and alert you if performance drops. To see what has changed, you can look at previous test results.
monitors the Core Web Vitals for your website over time. It also provides detailed reports that will help you optimize your website. You can also show the results you have had on your clients and other members of your team by generating reports.
DebugBear in terms of performance, accessibility and SEO. This gives you a breakdown of the audits that need improvement. Get your now and get the Core Web Vitals for this year.
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