Google’s new Core Web Vitals algorithm, launched around May–June 2021, has significantly affected our website. Web Vitals is essentially the first openly presented and “official” ranking algorithm based on three website quality metrics displayed in Google Search Console:
📗 LCP — Largest Contentful Paint — measures how quickly the largest element above the fold, such as text, an image, or a video, is rendered. LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load.
📗 FID — First Input Delay — measures a website’s responsiveness or how long it takes to respond to a user’s action. For example, when someone clicks a button, it measures how quickly the website begins loading or changing something. For a good user experience, pages should ideally have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
📗 CLS — Cumulative Layout Shift — measures visual stability and unexpected shifts in a website’s or page’s layout. In other words, it shows whether elements move, jump, or shift while the user scrolls through the content. For a good user experience, pages should ideally maintain a CLS score below 0.1 and should not exceed 0.25.
Our website periodically suffers because of this algorithm. At the moment, Core Web Vitals considers only 66% of the website’s URLs to be good, meaning that only this percentage of pages meets the required thresholds.
Most importantly, the graph clearly shows how the number of impressions generated by the website’s pages in search results declines (the blue line) as this percentage changes (the green bars): http://joxi.ru/xAeQRelubl6nGA. It is very painful to look at 😔. Google Search Console also displays the pages that fail to meet the requirements for each individual metric: http://joxi.ru/KAg6OM9HN9eGV2
We are constantly working to bring all these metrics within the recommended limits, but it has turned out to be more difficult than expected. The most frustrating part is that some issues are practically impossible to fix within the website’s current functionality and layout—at least according to our webmaster.
How have your websites been affected by this algorithm? What percentage of your URLs is considered good, how often does this figure fluctuate, and what are you doing to improve it?
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