Last year Google told us about their new Web Core Vitals. Simply put, these are important metrics in which we should keep in mind about our websites performance.
In the past webmaster have always been told by Google “HEY! Keep your website fast!”.
But, actually this is a pretty vague statement. How fast is fast? It’s very subjective.
As a rule therefore we came up with this idea of “the 3 second rule”.
Which is odd because clearly our tolerance to website speed is clearly much lower than how long food is edible after it’s dropped on the floor.
The “3 second rule” was just as thin and flimsy. If you website needed to load in three seconds, in some cases this was almost impossible, if you need to load some dynamic content from sources across the web.
The Web Core Vitals, puts all of these “grey areas” to rest. We have quantifiable numbers in which we can measure our sites against to see if we are good or not good.
What are the key metrics?
Web Core Vitals break down into three important metrics.
Largest Contentful Paint
First Input Delay
Culminative Layout Shift
These are all really complicated names for some actually really simple metrics. So let me rename them slightly to make them a little more understandable.
Speed to load the majority of content on the page.
The time it takes for what’s on the page to be interactive.
The amount the stuff shifts about on the page while it’s loading.