Skip to main content

Web Vitals: How to Benefit from Google's New Web Performance Metrics

Mehdi Daoudi

In today's landscape, your website has become a more powerful tool than ever. One of the most frustrating experiences for visitors is a slow, unresponsive website. Worst-case scenario, a web bounce causes prospects to permanently bounce from your company. In an effort to help companies improve web performance, Google launched the Web Vitals initiative in May and announced three new search engine ranking factors.

The initiative's objective? Simplify how companies measure user experience for their websites by introducing ranking factors called Core Web Vitals:

■ Loading performance

■ Interactivity

■ Visual stability

Counting the Reasons That UX Matters

With prospective customers increasingly digitally sophisticated, ensuring that they have positive user experiences when they visit is vital. Consider these UX statistics collected by the UXCam user experience blog:

■ 88% of people are less likely to return to a website after a bad user experience

■ 53% will leave a website if it takes more than three seconds to load

■ 90% have stopped using an app because of poor performance

■ 62% are less likely to purchase from a brand again if they've had a negative brand experience on mobile

■ Every $1 invested in UX results in a return of $100

"Product teams and designers creating products in isolation without consideration for the people who are the actual end-users are not going to succeed," said Toptal Lead UX/Product Designer Miklos Philips in a blog post.

Web Vitals Could Impact Your Company's SEO Ranking

As early as 2021, Google plans to rank webpages in its search engine based on the quality of the user experience delivered, After launch, annual updates to Core Web Vitals are expected.

Google already considered certain website metrics when search ranking. In 2015, Google began ranking sites based on how readily websites adapted to a mobile experience. Companies with the most mobile-friendly sites ranked higher in search. As mobile-friendly websites became common, Google began ranking by loading speed.

The recent announcement from Google gives companies time to prepare for Web Vitals. Just as how companies with mobile-friendly websites have benefited, companies that optimize for Web Vitals metrics will gain an edge.

Many metrics exist to gauge webpage performance. Let's walk through how Google defines Core Web Vitals and how to use them to measure web performance:

Largest Contentful Paint: LCP measures loading performance, specifically the time it takes for the largest element on a webpage to be rendered. For a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when a page starts loading, according to Google.

First Input Delay: FID measures interactivity, specifically how much time it takes between a user beginning to interact with a webpage, such as by clicking on a link, and the browser's response to that interaction. For a good user experience, pages should have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.

Cumulative Layout Shift: CLS measures visual stability by quantifying how often website content "jumps" when a webpage is loading. For a good user experience, pages should have a CLS of less than 0.1.

Seize the Opportunity Represented by Web Vitals

SEO ranking impacts company success. Companies can gain — or lose — major dollars based on their efforts to optimize these specific metrics. Ensuring that your company's webpages are high-performing on Core Web Vitals can mean the difference between a steady stream of new web visitors and radio silence as your company's low search ranking makes it almost impossible for people to find you. Prioritize these new search ranking factors now to benefit tremendously later.

One essential way to do that is by measuring and tracking Core Web Vitals. Doing so can detect web performance issues that need to be fixed so that search ranking doesn't suffer once Core Web Vitals are considered as part of Google's search algorithm. Choose a digital experience monitoring solution that lets you set up and measure Core Web Vitals as part of your existing web performance dashboard.

"These metrics are nothing but new methods of measuring applications in a way that matters to the end user, which ultimately results in meeting the customers' expectations," said Catchpoint's Loy Colaco and Megha Hanuman. "Different metrics provide different performance perspectives and the data from these metrics can play a crucial role in improving the end-user experience."

The Latest

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...

Web Vitals: How to Benefit from Google's New Web Performance Metrics

Mehdi Daoudi

In today's landscape, your website has become a more powerful tool than ever. One of the most frustrating experiences for visitors is a slow, unresponsive website. Worst-case scenario, a web bounce causes prospects to permanently bounce from your company. In an effort to help companies improve web performance, Google launched the Web Vitals initiative in May and announced three new search engine ranking factors.

The initiative's objective? Simplify how companies measure user experience for their websites by introducing ranking factors called Core Web Vitals:

■ Loading performance

■ Interactivity

■ Visual stability

Counting the Reasons That UX Matters

With prospective customers increasingly digitally sophisticated, ensuring that they have positive user experiences when they visit is vital. Consider these UX statistics collected by the UXCam user experience blog:

■ 88% of people are less likely to return to a website after a bad user experience

■ 53% will leave a website if it takes more than three seconds to load

■ 90% have stopped using an app because of poor performance

■ 62% are less likely to purchase from a brand again if they've had a negative brand experience on mobile

■ Every $1 invested in UX results in a return of $100

"Product teams and designers creating products in isolation without consideration for the people who are the actual end-users are not going to succeed," said Toptal Lead UX/Product Designer Miklos Philips in a blog post.

Web Vitals Could Impact Your Company's SEO Ranking

As early as 2021, Google plans to rank webpages in its search engine based on the quality of the user experience delivered, After launch, annual updates to Core Web Vitals are expected.

Google already considered certain website metrics when search ranking. In 2015, Google began ranking sites based on how readily websites adapted to a mobile experience. Companies with the most mobile-friendly sites ranked higher in search. As mobile-friendly websites became common, Google began ranking by loading speed.

The recent announcement from Google gives companies time to prepare for Web Vitals. Just as how companies with mobile-friendly websites have benefited, companies that optimize for Web Vitals metrics will gain an edge.

Many metrics exist to gauge webpage performance. Let's walk through how Google defines Core Web Vitals and how to use them to measure web performance:

Largest Contentful Paint: LCP measures loading performance, specifically the time it takes for the largest element on a webpage to be rendered. For a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when a page starts loading, according to Google.

First Input Delay: FID measures interactivity, specifically how much time it takes between a user beginning to interact with a webpage, such as by clicking on a link, and the browser's response to that interaction. For a good user experience, pages should have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.

Cumulative Layout Shift: CLS measures visual stability by quantifying how often website content "jumps" when a webpage is loading. For a good user experience, pages should have a CLS of less than 0.1.

Seize the Opportunity Represented by Web Vitals

SEO ranking impacts company success. Companies can gain — or lose — major dollars based on their efforts to optimize these specific metrics. Ensuring that your company's webpages are high-performing on Core Web Vitals can mean the difference between a steady stream of new web visitors and radio silence as your company's low search ranking makes it almost impossible for people to find you. Prioritize these new search ranking factors now to benefit tremendously later.

One essential way to do that is by measuring and tracking Core Web Vitals. Doing so can detect web performance issues that need to be fixed so that search ranking doesn't suffer once Core Web Vitals are considered as part of Google's search algorithm. Choose a digital experience monitoring solution that lets you set up and measure Core Web Vitals as part of your existing web performance dashboard.

"These metrics are nothing but new methods of measuring applications in a way that matters to the end user, which ultimately results in meeting the customers' expectations," said Catchpoint's Loy Colaco and Megha Hanuman. "Different metrics provide different performance perspectives and the data from these metrics can play a crucial role in improving the end-user experience."

The Latest

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...