Tips To Prepare for Google’s New Core Web Vitals Algorithm
Amanda Todorovich, senior director of digital content, Cleveland Clinic
Google is changing its search algorithm this month. Is your team prepared? With the new algorithm, called Core Web Vitals, Google will implement a new set of metrics that take into account page experience in search ranking.
“Core Web Vitals is really getting at the overall experience of your page. Are users able to see everything quickly on the page? Are they able to get to the information fast?” says Amanda Todorovich, senior director of digital content at Cleveland Clinic.
The following rankings will be in addition to existing search guidelines on mobile friendliness, safe browsing, https security, and pop-ups:
- Largest contentful paint (LCP) will measure how quickly the main content on the page loads. To be considered in the green “good” range, pages will need to load in 2.5 seconds or faster.
- First input delay (FID) will measure the amount of time it takes for a page to become interactive. This can be when a user clicks a link or button to when the browser actually responds to the interaction. An ideal load time is 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative layout shift (CLS) will measure how much the layout of a page shifts as new content is loaded. You may experience this when reading news articles with images and advertisements that load later, causing the text to jump.
Todorovich says her team began discussing what the new metrics could mean for Cleveland Clinic site almost immediately after the Google blog was posted.
“Literally the day they posted on their blog about it, we started paying attention to it and started talking a lot about it,” she says. “We looked at our baseline to see how much work we’d have to do before the algorithm goes into effect.”
Learn more about Cleveland Clinic’s preparations, along with recommendations for how smaller teams can make the biggest impact on the key metrics:
How Cleveland Clinic Prepped for Google’s Core Web Vitals Algorithm
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