Core Web Vitals are again at the centre of the SEO world in 2024 making page experience a substantial ranking and revenue consideration for businesses looking to improve their web properties. With the user experience being the true deciding factor in a website’s SEO success, page speed, interactivity and image visual stability are now more critical SEO performance factors for web teams than before. Sites with poor CLS, LCP and FID scores are destined for lower rankings, less traffic and less visibility. Businesses need to ensure their sites offer user experiences that earn visits and keep them coming back by allowing users to interact and react smoothly with them without experiencing long loading or rendering times.
This article explains how Core Web Vitals have influenced SEO strategies in 2024, why they matter and what webmasters should do to optimise websites for these key SEO metrics. Understanding Core Web Vitals, these elements will be necessary to stay competitive with the ever-changing digital environment. In the next paragraph, we’ll break down the most important factors businesses need to keep in focus to stay competitive.
Understanding Core Web Vitals The Foundation of Google’s Ranking System
These are Core Web Vitals, a set of ‘standardised, quantifiable attributes’ for measuring distinct facets of user experience that Google announced in May 2020. By the way, these attributes will still be an essential part of Google’s ranking algorithm on 1 March 2024. Here are the three specific metrics you will definitely need to know: Speed, where Core Web Vitals measure the load time of entire pages. When we discuss ‘slowing down’, that’s what we mean.Interactivity, which refers to a site visitor’s ability to click something, like clicking on a search result to direct the application’s attention to a specific part of a web page, and how quickly responding to that click (or any other form of input such as typing text) can improve website performance. When we talk about an unresponsive site, this is likely what we’re talking about.Visitability, which represents the stability of a site with respect to properties such as aspect ratio and scrolling behaviour (you’re probably familiar with when the page is jumping around below your cursor as it loads, which is never fun). When your site ‘feels jittery’, this is probably what it means.
Core Web Vitals, the three metrics most used to assess optimisation, are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). LCP measures how fast the largest piece of content (an image, block of text) appears on the screen; FID requires the page to respond to a user input (like a click); and CLS measures how much things shift around on the screen as it loads. In each case, better scores make for a website that feels faster and more reliable, which is exactly what users want. If a website fails to make the cut with any of these metrics, Google is likely to lower the site’s rankings on the search results page, reducing overall traffic and conversions.
Why Page Speed Matters More Than Ever in 2024
Page speed is nothing new – websites that load quickly gain a natural SEO advantage because they’re clean and fast, leading to lower bounce rates and more time spent on the site. With Core Web Vitals, SEO assumes even greater importance. In 2024, speed isn’t a nice-to-have amenity – it’s a necessity if you want high rankings. Slow-loading sites aren’t merely annoying to their users. They’re also flagged by Google for providing poor user experiences, which lower their rankings.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). IYKYK. The key is to make sure that images, videos and large blocks of text load quickly. Anything you can do to optimise your LCP will make a dent in your load times. Once again, optimising for speed means optimising images, caching files in the browser, and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to speed up the delivery of files. And minimising server response times, which add to loads times (albeit having a smaller impact on LCP scores and rankings) is part of your team’s daily to-do list for 2024.
Enhancing Interactivity The Importance of First Input Delay (FID)
Interactivity is a major driver of user satisfaction, a phenomenon which Google measures via an important ranking factor known as First Input Delay (FID) – the time it takes for a site to respond to the first interaction, whether it be a button click, the start of filling in a form or navigating to a subpage through a menu. As such, in 2024 and beyond, sites with any interactivity, like forms, eCommerce checkout pages or a dynamically built menu system, will have to take care not to incur a high FID, or they might be doomed to either ranking poorly on Google or even being kicked out of the index altogether. If website users navigate to a site and are unable to perform their intended tasks, such as completing a form or checking out from an eCommerce page, they are likely to exit, signalling to Google that the SEO sites are delivering poor experience scores.
Companies can improve FID by reducing how much JavaScript executes on their page and how long it takes to process user inputs (overly long tasks in web developer-speak). Deferring your non-critical JavaScript, breaking up long tasks with requests that don’t block the main thread of execution, and using web workers are useful techniques for improving the response time of these scripts. Another key to improving FID is optimising your server responses to avoid overloading the browser with requests that slow down interactions. Ultimately, that’s the goal – having a few seconds rather than a few thousand milliseconds pass before your browser can respond to every little click and input. Your users will notice it whether or not Google does.
Achieving Visual Stability Tackling Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Visual stability, or Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), is just the opposite – it measures how stable the elements on a page are as it’s loading. (If you’ve ever gone to click on a button and the layout just jumped and something else popped into view, it’s annoying enough that you’re likely to move on to another site. Imagine what that does to your conversion rates.) If a site lots of things jumping around as a page is loading, Google negatively penalises it. And for good reason: for users, it’s a jarring experience, it’s unreliable, and it’s not going to lead to a good conversion. In 2024, it should be part of your ranking checklist to be sure it’s at its best.
Reducing CLS requires several steps, including applying explicit size attributes to media (pictures, videos etc), making it clear to the browser how much space you’d like the webpage to reserve before those load, reducing dynamically injected content (eg, content that through JavaScript shifts everything around on the page) and being judicious in avoiding font and ad interactions that will cause the page to reshuffle itself whenever those load. Image supplied by author businesses can improve their CLS rating and, in the process, their SEO performance by prioritising stability and avoiding unexpected reshuffling at key moments.
The SEO Implications of Core Web Vitals in 2024
By the year 2024, the Core Web Vitals have become a key part of the SEO calculus: sites that surpass or meet the thresholds are directly rewarded with higher rankings because, quite simply, Core Web Vitals are in part a rankings factor by Google’s judgment of a site’s impact on the user experience. There’s little use in pretending that understanding (and, ideally, optimising) these Core Web Vitals isn’t part of any modern SEO strategy designed to improve traffic from search engines.
But Core Web Vitals aren’t a siloed ranking factor either. They enhance or compound traditional SEO in areas such as keyword optimisation, mobile-friendliness, and link-building. In short, businesses must fine-tune their websites so that they deliver the right level of quality content, while also delivering it in a technically optimal way. Companies that only focus on creating high-quality content, but don’t execute it effectively for users by optimising site performance, can still end up with poor rankings – no matter how good the content is. By 2024, traditional and Core Web Vitals SEO strategies need to both be incorporated to achieve an all-encompassing approach that satisfies users and search engines alike.
Actionable Steps for Optimizing Core Web Vitals in 2024
For businesses wanting to be in the game in 2024, what steps can you take to optimise Core Web Vitals? Start by doing an audit of your site through automated tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse. It will show how fast your site loads on your desktop in comparison with other sites. It will also show the number of kilobytes that have to be downloaded to display your page. In addition to speed metrics, these tools also assess how pages are rendered and focused, indicating if elements move unexpectedly when the page loads – a layout shift. Finally, automated tools also show how much time users had to wait until the content starts to be displayed, which is crucial in the era of impatience and the law of fastest fingers.
Identifying problem areas is one thing – the next step is implementation. Improving LCP might necessitate image compression, removing render-blocking online resources, or faster server response time; improving FID could hinge on reducing JavaScript execution time or chunking lengthy tasks; and, for CLS, we can set explicit dimensions on images like carousels, as well as avoiding ad units that push content down the viewport. We can also set metrics in the code so that, as long as pages do not go beyond a certain limit, they exceed the basic standards. The key, for businesses, is continuous monitoring and testing, because Google keeps tinkering with its algorithms and the thresholds for the Core Web Vitals. Always keep up to date, as it could mean the difference between a ranking boost for your site and an enhanced user experience.
Conclusion
In 2024, Core Web Vitals continue to serve as a critical factor for determining SEO success, making it essential for businesses to optimize their websites for page speed, interactivity, and visual stability. Google’s focus on these metrics is a reflection of the increasing importance of user experience in ranking algorithms. Websites that fail to prioritize Core Web Vitals risk losing visibility and traffic, while those that excel in these areas can gain a significant competitive edge.
By understanding and optimizing for Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift, businesses can improve their user experience, boost rankings, and ultimately drive more conversions. As SEO practices evolve, staying ahead requires an ongoing commitment to technical performance, ensuring that websites not only look good but also function seamlessly. For those looking to succeed in the competitive digital landscape of 2024, Core Web Vitals should remain at the forefront of any SEO strategy.
