Google’s latest update from its Google Search Center SEO Office Hours indicates the Importance of Core Web Vitals in the Search Rankings Boost of a website.

Here we bring a brief overview about what are these core web vitals and what do they mean for Google’s Search Rankings? If you are looking to design your SEO ready websites, you may also want to check our recent blogs on “Why and How To Get SEO Done Along With Website Redesign?” and “Best Digital Marketing Strategies for my Business?”

Google’s Core Web Vitals can be checked on the Google Page Speed Insights page. Google’s Page Speed Insights gives a brief picture of a website’s health. A website’s health is calculated based on six main lighthouse parameters. They are:

1. First Contentful Paint
2. Speed Index
3. Largest Contentful Paint
4. Time to Interactive
5. Total Blocking Time
6. Cumulative Layout Shift

The parameters are currently distributed as below:

However, the new update indicates that the new search rankings boost algorithm will consider the following three Core Web Vitals when boosting the search rankings:

1. LCP – Largest Contentful Paint
   It is the time taken for the largest content (Text or Image) in the viewport to render on the screen. Typically this is indicated as follows:
   
   0-2.5 seconds – Green (Fast rendering)
   2.5-4 seconds – Orange (Moderate rendering)
   Over 4 seconds – Red (slow)
   
   This is expected to be in Green for better rankings.
2. FCP – First Contentful Paint
   This is the time the browser takes to render the first Data Object Model (DOM) content after a user first navigates to our website. Typically Images, SVGs, etc., fall under this type of content.
   Here is the color code as per google page speed insights:
   
   0-2 seconds → Green
   2-4 seconds → Orange
   Over 4 seconds → Red
   
   A good FCP score would be less than 100ms.
3. CLS – Cummulative Layout Shift

   This is the shift in the page layout when the page is still rendering. This occurs when the DOM elements are loaded asynchronously. It is rated as follows:
   
   0-0.1 → Green – (Good)
   0.1-0.25 → Orange – (Moderate)
   >0.25 → Red (Low)

   A good CLS score should be 0.1 or less.

The above parameters shall be considered vital for Google Search Rankings boost. However, if a website has all the parameters in Green but doesn’t have a secure protocol with https, it will not be considered for the ranking factor.

It is essential to pay a little attention to these parameters when you are focused on the search engine ranking for your business websites.

John Mueller also indicated that Google is planning to introduce a badge in the search results to indicate those websites that pass the core web vitals. Google seems to have been experimenting quite a bit around these core web vitals and has been thoroughly testing its algorithms scheduled to be released in May this year.

You can watch the full video here: