Over the past few years, Google’s been hinting, cajoling, pestering us all to do better with our websites – make them easier to understand, easier to use, more secure, etc. This June’s coming update is no exception, focusing on “Core Web Vitals” (CWV) across all websites. It’s been a strategic carrot and stick approach – the “carrot” being more search visibility and site visitors (and therefore more business) and the “stick” being just the opposite, with a longer road to recovery.
Here at KME.digital, we’ve taken this guidance to heart, for the past 15 years, and not just with Google. All our customers want their own existing and future customers to find and interact with their website quickly, efficiently, with very little friction from underlying technologies. This is an easily understood concept, i.e. make your website easy to use and understand. It’s not so easy to implement, however, in competitive digital marketplaces among rapidly changing Internet technologies.
We do this every day, aligning our customer web design and marketing with all search algorithm changes and trends. Our integrated team approach applies SEO, programming, IT infrastructure, security, creativity, branding, and information management skills as a holistic package, to simplify how users find, engage and transact with our customers online.
Simply speaking, Google’s CWV metrics indicate how friendly your site is for users, focusing on three core metrics:
- CLS or “Cumulative Layout Shifts” – Does the page jump around when you interact with it? How is the page view experience, vs. performance? Consistently measuring page speed isn’t always useful, with so many tools showing different results.
- FID or “First Input Delay” – How soon does the page respond to user input, how interactive is it to taps and clicks? While the page is loading, it’s important that the site is usable.
- LCP or “Largest Contentful Paint” – How soon does the primary 25% of the page load for users, i.e. the main content? This is a “perceived” page speed indicator, helping users choose their next actions faster, and be more satisfied with the experience.
These are specific things most website owners with knowledgeable programmers and current technology can deal with, for optimal user experience. Not only these kinds of metrics but all of the “Web Vitals” metrics Google uses to determine usability and rankings. We already account for these technical, “user experience” (UX) factors in all our designs, and have learned many lessons for our customers along the way. We regularly resize and compress all images, avoid pop-ups wherever possible, and continually look for hosting platform improvements for optimal performance.
In fact, we recently moved all our hosted websites onto a new, industry-leading platform that’s generating at least 50% better UX performance for many websites. This is already paying dividends not only in terms of page rank and web traffic, but ultimately in terms of transactions, upsell, and customer retention.
In summary, Google’s newest and widely-publicized CWV algorithm update is already well-understood and supported at KME.digital. The roll-out of these updates is expected to be gradual, over a few months, and not really be a dramatic change. Therefore it’s important for website owners to consistently monitor the trends and patterns for user activity and rankings updates over time, and get started now on any significant UX design and performance updates.
If you’re not ready or don’t know – give us a call!