Core Web Vitals are built on three main metrics which quantify a user's experience on a website including Loading- LCP(Largest Contentful Point), Interactivity - FID (First Input Delay) and Visual Stability - Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

LCP measures the loading performance of your website. It tracks the largest visible element within the viewport and measures how long it takes to render that element after the page has started loading. It requires to be below 2.5 seconds to be in the green area, and between 2.5 to 4 seconds is in the amber area and anything more than 4 seconds is in the poor area.

FID measures the time it takes for your website to respond to a user's first interaction. From a user's perspective if a website takes longer to load and start responding to their interactions then it is regarded as a poor website. To be within the good region your FID needs to be below 100 milliseconds. 

CLS measures the number of layout shifts that take place when a website loads. Layout shifts happen when the elements keep loading and push down the rest of the content below. It happens a lot when loading larger images, videos, fonts, deferred CSS files and JS. For a good website CLS needs to be below 0.1 and anything above 0.25 is regarded to be poor. 

There are many tools that you can use to test your website for Core Web Vitals. These don't require complex web development skills to know whether your website is doing good.

Google Search Console is the first place you'd want to look at for these metrics. You can find the values by clicking the "Core Web Vitals" under the "Experience" section in Google Search Console.

It is a tool that runs various insights into your website. All you have to do is to follow through to Page Speed Insight type in your website's URL and click the analyze button. It generates a detailed report on various metrics including Core Web Vitals. Above all, it displays an overall score that needs to be above 90. 

This is another free online tool that provides you with performance reports of your website. It is also as simple as visiting a website and typing in your URL followed by a button click. We use GTmetrix quite often as it offers a few useful features that allow you to download a PDF report or get a sharable link.

Why should I comply with Core Web Vitals? This is an important question to ask. Well, these three metrics that measure the user experience of your website. Statistics reveal that 1 in 4 visitors abandon a website that takes more than 4 seconds to load and a single second's delay reduces customer satisfaction by 16%. More importantly, unless you have a  niche market 46% of your visitors won’t come back if your website performs poorly. These Core Web Vitals metrics just test those fundamental requirements to check how healthy your website is. 

Another important fact is that from May 2021 Google is including Core Web Vitals in deciding search rankings for websites. You'd wonder what other factors that Google considers in measuring the quality of a page. In a nutshell, those are: 

1. Mobile-friendliness 
2. Whether websites are served with secure HTTPS connections
3. Whether websites have any malicious software  
4. The extent to which there are intrusive contents 
5. Core Web Vitals 

By running a Core Web Vitals test you’d know where you stand in terms of the first-hand user experience of your website and will know what needs to be done to push your website forward. If you require help with fixing your website to match the latest criteria we are more than happy to help. 

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