Web Vitals Offer New Way To Measure User Experience For Your Site

Everyone in the music business – whether they do their work on stage or behind the scenes – wants their website to rank as high as possible in a Google search, something the internet behemoth has made a bit easier to do with their new set of metrics called Web Vitals.

Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0

It doesn’t matter if you’re a songwriter, artist, band, record label, publisher, marketing company or any other entity in the music business, if you have a website (and you should) you want it to rank high in a Google search. The platform’s search algorithm is said to be very complex and a secret though, but Google has tried to make things simpler for those of us with websites with a new set of metrics called Web Vitals.

Supposedly Google’s algorithm to determine your search ranking has over 100 data points, but Web Vitals breaks that down not only to just the important things that every site owner should be aware of, but goes even further with a subset called Core Web Vitals (see the graphic below).

Each Core Web Vital looks at a specific piece of the user’s page experience so you can make sense of the perceived experience of your site. There are 3 basics that Core Web Vitals measure:

• How fast does you site load
• How interactive is your site
• Is your site visually stable

Of course, Google calls these three new metrics something a bit more complex:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
• First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity, or how long it takes the browser to respond when a link is clicked. To provide a good user experience, pages should have a FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. This measures the percentage of the screen affected by movement — i.e. does stuff jump around on screen. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.

Google believes that the Core Web Vitals are critical to all web experiences. As a result, it’s committed to bringing these metrics to all of its popular tools. That said, the easiest way to measure all the Core Web Vitals is to use the web-vitals JavaScript library, a small, production-ready wrapper around the underlying web APIs that measures each metric in a way that accurately matches how they’re reported by all the Google tools listed above.

Basically what’s happening here is that Google is making metrics available to the average site owner that only experienced webmasters had access to before. Still, it does take a little programming knowledge to implement them, but if it means a higher search ranking for your page it’s well worth it.