Learn how business decision makers and non-developers can improve Core Web Vitals.
Introduction
Website user experience has been shown to have a direct impact on business outcomes. Delivering a better experience, where websites load and respond to users faster, often results in increased engagement and conversions. Core Web Vitals is an initiative to quantify the user experience of websites to identify areas for improvements.
However, a lot of Core Web Vitals documentation is aimed at web developers, with deep technical understanding and full control over their code. Many websites are created by non-developers using a "site-builder" platform such as WordPress, Shopify, Wix, or other similar solutions often without a web development team.
Even where there is a dedicated team or web developers, they are not the only ones responsible for web performance. Business decision makers have a huge influence over website performance, from deciding content and designs, to developing advertising strategies in an effort to drive more traffic to their websites. These decisions often have a significant impact on website performance.
This guide aims to provide some relevant information for site builders and owners to understand—and improve—their user experience as much as possible, without requiring deep technical knowledge of web development.
At the same time, many performance issues require developers to implement technical fixes, and our developer focused guides can help with these efforts. This is not intended to be a comprehensive guide, but rather more of an introduction to the Core Web Vitals initiative for business decision makers with some common non-development root causes of poor page performance. Beyond these, a web developer will likely need to be engaged to make further progress.
What are the Core Web Vitals?
The Core Web Vitals are a set of three metrics designed to measure a page's user experience—and in particular how fast the page feels to users. Each of these has a three letter abbreviation:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures loading performance: how much time, in seconds, it takes for the page's most prominent content to appear after a page has started loading.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability of a page: how much the content moves around while loading.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page responds to clicks, taps, and keyboard interactions.
Each metric measures a different facet of the user experience. Google also provides recommended thresholds for each metric, and user experiences less than the lower threshold is considered good, and user experiences higher than the upper threshold are considered poor. Between these thresholds, a page is considered to be in the needs improvement range. Keep in mind that, with these metrics, lower numbers are better.
How are the Core Web Vitals measured?
Core Web Vitals are measured by the real users of your website, and different users will have different results. They are not "what Google thinks" nor "what googlebot thinks", but what your website's actual users have experienced.
Some users will be on faster devices and faster networks. Some will be on slower devices or slower networks. Some users will visit simpler, faster pages on your site, others more complex, slower pages. The results of all these user experiences are then aggregated to give an overall measure of your entire website.
Google makes the data from opted-in Chrome users available in the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX), which feeds into many Google tools such as PageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console.
CrUX is available on millions of popular websites, but not all websites are in CrUX. Other Real User Monitoring (RUM) tools can also collect these metrics for your site.
How can I find my site's Core Web Vitals?
There are many tools that show Core Web Vital metrics provided by Google and by third parties. This post introduces two tools that let you quickly view the Core Web Vitals for your site. For a deeper look at the other Google tools—including a workflow for using them to address Core Web Vitals—see the Core Web Vitals workflows with Google tools post.
If your platform provides an integrated RUM solution, it can provide much more detailed information for pages on your site, or allow you to drill down into particular pages or segment your users to help understand and identify issues.
PageSpeed Insights
For a quick view which requires no setup, you can use PageSpeed Insights (PSI). Type in the URL and click analyze. If your site is included in CrUX, you should quickly be presented with a "Discover what your real users are experiencing" section: