Google is built upon algorithms. SEO is all about appealing to those algorithms to ensure your site shows up on that invaluable page one. Here at Wildfire, the number one SEO Agency in Leeds, we pride ourselves on understanding every metric Google measures when crawling your site. When Google makes changes, it’s a very big deal. The last key change displaced over 10% of top Google results according to analysts. After a short delay, Google is making some changes to SEO that are being rolled out as soon as mid-June. If you want to learn about them and how you can capitalise for site content, read this first part of our new Core Web Vitals mini-series.
What are Core Web Vitals?
For a long time, Google has heavily favoured “AMP” pages on mobile. Launched in 2016, these Accelerated Mobile Pages were designed to create a smoother mobile experience. Whilst heavily favoured by Google in mobile rankings – their lack of widespread adoption means they’re now getting replaced. Rather than favouring pages with the AMP badge (also going away) for mobile results, the platform-agnostic “Page Experience” metric is going to be an important factor in site ranking on all platforms. Your “Page Experience” ranking is governed by 3 separate scores. These are your Core Web Vitals. These are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- First Input Delay (FID)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Let’s start with Largest Contentful Paint in this Blog.
What is Largest Contentful Paint?
LCP is a test of sorts, designed to reflect your site’s overall performance when being loaded. LCP tracks the time it takes for the largest interactable element in the viewport to be rendered. Let’s break this down:
An interactable element could be anything from a button to a background image.
The Viewport is the view the user first has of your page when they open it.
Rendering is the process of first displaying the object. Essentially the time it takes to load.
Your LCP needs to take around 2.5 seconds to be considered optimal by Google.
Wildfire Marketing hopes this guide has introduced you to the latest Google changes, the Core Web Vitals, and given you a deeper understanding of Largest Contentful Paint. Stay tuned for more information on First Input Delay and Cumulative Layout Shift on our site. Contact us today to implement Core Web Vitals into your site.