We Analyzed 208K Webpages. Here's What We Learned About Core Web Vitals and UX
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We Analyzed 208K WebpagesHere's What We Learned About
Core Web Vitals and UX

We Analyzed 208k Webpages. Here’s What We Learned About Core Web Vitals and UX
Brian Dean

Written by Brian Dean

We analyzed 208,085 webpages to learn more about Core Web Vitals.

First, we established benchmarks for Cumulative Layout Shift, First Input Delay, and Largest Contentful Paint.

Then, we looked into the correlation between Core Web Vitals and user experience metrics (like bounce rate).

Thanks to data provided by WebCEO, we were able to uncover some interesting findings.

Let’s dive right into the data.

Here is a Summary of Our Key Findings:

1. 53.77% of sites had a good Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score. 46.23% of sites had β€œpoor” or β€œneeds improvement” LCP ratings.

2. 53.85% of websites in our data set had optimal First Input Delay (FID) ratings. Only 8.57% of sites had a β€œpoor” FID score.

3. 65.13% of analyzed sites boasted good optimal Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) scores.

4. The average LCP of the sites we analyzed clocked in at 2,386 milliseconds.

5. Average FID was 137.74 milliseconds.

6. The mean CLS score was 0.14. This is slightly higher than the optimal score.

7. The most common issues impacting LCP were high request counts and large transfer sizes.

8. Large layout shifts were the #1 cause of poor CLS scores.

9. The most common issue affecting FID was an inefficient cache policy.

10. There was a weak correlation between Core Web Vital scores and UX metrics.

11. We did find that FID did tend to slightly correlate with page views.

53.77% of Websites Had an Optimal Largest Contentful Paint Score

Our first goal was to see how each site performed based on the three factors that make up Google’s Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and First Input Delay.

Core web vitals are part of Google's overall evaluation of "page experience"

Specifically, we wanted to determine the percentage of pages that were classified as β€œgood”, β€œneeds improvement” and β€œpoor” inside of each site’s Search Console.

To do this, we analyzed anonymized Google Search Console data from 208k pages (approximately 20k total sites).

Our first task: analyze LCP (Large Contentful Paint). In simple terms, LCP measures how long it takes a page to load its visible content.

Here’s how the sites that we analyzed fared:

53.77% of websites had an optimal largest contentful paint score
  • Good: 53.77%
  • Needs Improvement: 28.76%
  • Poor: 17.47%

As you can see, the majority of sites that we looked at had a β€œgood” LCP rating. This was higher than expected, especially when taking into account other benchmarking efforts (like this one by iProspect).

It may be that the websites in our dataset are especially diligent about page performance. Or it may be partly due to a sample size difference (the iProspect analysis continuously monitors 1,500 sites. We analyzed 20,000+).

Either way, it’s encouraging to see that only about half of all websites need to work on their LCP.

53.85% of Websites We Analyzed Had Good First Input Delay Ratings

Next, we looked at Search Console reported First Input Delay (FID) ratings. As the name suggests, FIP measures the delay between the first request and a user being able to input something (like typing in a username).

Here’s a breakdown of FID scores from our dataset:

53.85% of websites we analyzed had good first input delay ratings
  • Good: 53.85%
  • Needs Improvement: 37.58%
  • Poor: 8.57%

Again, just over half of the sites we looked at had β€œgood” FID ratings.

Interestingly, very few (8.57%) had β€œpoor” scores. This shows that a relatively small number of sites are likely to be negatively affected once Google incorporates FID into their algorithm.

65.13% of Sites Had an Optimal Cumulative Layout Shift Score

Finally, we looked at the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) ratings from Search Console.

CLS is a measurement of how elements on a page move while loading. Pages that are relatively stable through the loading process have high (good) CLS scores.

Here were the CLS ratings among the sites that we analyzed:

65.13% of sites-had an optimal cumulative layout shift score
  • Good: 65.13%
  • Needs Improvement: 17.03%
  • Poor: 17.84%

Among the three Core Web Vitals scores, CLS tended to be the least problematic. In fact, only around 35% of the sites that we analyzed need to work on their CLS.

Average LCP Is 2,836 Milliseconds

Next, we wanted to establish benchmarks for each Core Web Vital metric. As mentioned above, Google has created their own set of guidelines for each Core Web Vital.

(For example, a β€œgood” LCP is considered to be under 2.5 seconds.)

However, we hadn’t seen a large-scale analysis that attempted to benchmark each Core Web Vital metric β€œin the wild”.

First, we benchmarked LCP scores for the sites in our database.

Among the sites that we analyzed, the average LCP turned out to be 2,836 Milliseconds (2.8 seconds).

Average LCP is 2.836 milliseconds

Here were the most common issues that negatively impacted LCP performance:

Issues affecting LCP
  • High request counts and large transfer sizes (100% of pages)
  • High network round-trip time (100% of pages)
  • Critical request chains (98.9% of pages)
  • High initial server response time (57.4% of pages)
  • Images not served in next-gen format (44.6% of pages)

Overall, 100% of pages had high LCP scores at least partly due to β€œHigh request counts and large transfer sizes”. In other words, pages that are heavy with excess code, large file sizes, or both.

This finding is in line with another analysis that we did which found that large pages tended to be the culprit behind most slow-loading pages.

Average FID Is 137.4 Milliseconds

We then looked at FID scores among the pages in our dataset.

Overall, the mean First Input Delay was 137.4 milliseconds:

Average FID is 137.4 milliseconds

Here are the most prevalent FID-related issues that we discovered:

Issues affecting FID
  • Inefficient cache policy (87.4% of pages)
  • Long main-thread tasks (78.4% of pages)
  • Unused JavaScript (54.1% of pages)
  • Unused CSS (38.7% of pages)
  • Excessive Document Object Model size (22.3% of pages)

It was interesting to see that caching issues tended to negatively affect FID more than any other problem. And, not surprisingly, poorly-optimized code (in the form of unused JS and CSS) was behind many high FID scores.

Average CLS Is .14

We discovered that the average CLS score is .14.

Average CLS is .14

This metric specifically looks at how the content on a page β€œshifts”.Anything below .1 is rated as β€œgood” in Search Console.

The most common issues affecting the projects’ CLS included:

Issues affecting CLS
  • Large layout shifts (94.5% of pages)
  • Render-blocking resources (86.3% of pages)
  • Text hidden during web font load (82.6% of pages)
  • Not preloaded key requests (26.7% of pages)
  • Improperly sized images (24.7% of pages)

How LCP Correlates With User Behavior

Now that benchmarks were set, we then set to find out how accurately Core Web Vitals represent real-life user experience.

In fact, this relationship is something that Google themselves highlight in their β€œCore Web Vitals report” documentation:

Google – Why page performance matters

To analyze Core Web Vitals and their impact on UX, we decided to look at three UX metrics designed to represent user behavior on webpages:

  • Bounce rate (% of users leaving a website’s page upon visiting it)
  • Page depth per session (how many pages users see before leaving the website)
  • Time on website (how much time users spend on a website in a single session)

Our hypothesis was as follows: if you improve a website’s Core Web Vitals, it will positively affect UX metrics.

In other words, a site with β€œgood” Core Web Vitals will have a lower bounce rate, longer sessions, and higher page views. Fortunately, in addition to Search Console data, this data set also contained UX metrics from Google Analytics.

Then, we simply had to compare each website’s Core Web Vitals against each UX metric. You can find our results for LCP below:

LCP and Bounce Rate

Correlation between LCP and bounce rate

LCP and Pages per Session

Correlation between LCP and pages per session

LCP and Time on Site

Correlation between LCP and time on site

On the three graphs, it was clear that all three different segments (Good, Poor and Needs Improvement) are somewhat evenly distributed on the graph.

In other words, there wasn’t any direct relationship between LCP and UX metrics.

FID Has a Slight Relationship With Page Views

Next, we looked at the potential relationship between First Input Delay and user behavior.

Like with LCP, it’s logical that a poor FID would negatively impact UX metrics (especially bounce rate).

A user that needs to wait to choose from a menu or type in their password is likely to become frustrated and bounce. And if that experience carries across several pages, it may lead to them reducing their total page views.

With that, here’s how FID correlated with their behavioral metrics.

FID and Bounce Rate

Correlation between FID and bounce rate

FID and Pages per Session

Correlation between FID and pages per session

Note: We found that a high FID tends to correlate with a low number of pages per session. The opposite was also true.

FID and Time on Site

Correlation between FID and time on site

Overall, the only instance where we see hints of correlation is when we compare FID to the number of pages viewed per session. When it comes to bounce rate and time on site, a website’s FID appears to have no influence on user behavior.

How CLS Impacts User Behavior

Next, we wanted to investigate a potential link between CLS and user activity.

It seems logical that a poor CLS would frustrate users. And could therefore increase the bounce rate and reduce session time.

However, we weren’t able to find any case studies or large-scale analysis that demonstrated that high CLS scores influence user behavior. So we decided to run an analysis that looked for potential relationships between CLS, bounce rate, β€œdwell time” and pages viewed. Here’s what we found:

CLS and Bounce Rate

Correlation between CLS and bounce rate

CLS and Pages per Session

Correlation between CLS and pages per session

CLS and Time on Site

Correlation between CLS and time on site

Overall, we didn’t see any significant correlation between CLS, bounce rate, time on site, or page views.

Summary

I hope you found this analysis interesting and useful (especially with Google’s Page Experience update on the way).

Here’s a link to the raw data set that we used. Along with our methods.

I want to thank SEO software WebCEO for providing the data that made this industry study possible.

Overall, it was interesting to see that most of the sites that we analyzed performed relatively well. And are largely ready for the Google update. And it was interesting to find that, while Core Web Vitals represent metrics for a positive UX on a website, we didn’t see any correlation with behavioral metrics.

Now I’d like to hear from you:

What’s your main takeaway from today’s study? Or maybe you have a question about something from the analysis. Either way, leave a comment below right now.

135 Comments

  1. Thank you so much Brian for this impressive study on Core Web Vitals, which are so important right now and will be even more so in the future. It’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome, Rene. It will be interesting to see how much the SERPs shake up when the update goes live. My guess is that it won’t be huge. But sites with “good” Core Web Vitals will have a slight edge.

  2. As always, some great analysis Brian, thanks! I guess the key takeaway for me is that if you are in the “poor” category there does seem to be some impact on user experience, whereas it is more negligible for “needs improvement” vs “good”.

    I also think it is important to take these optimisations with balance. It’s unlikely that many sites will be able to get “good” for everything on both desktop and mobile – but as long as their site is focussed on creating great content for their users then they shouldn’t feel too much of an impact when this thig rolls out. If you do want to improve your core web vitals, do it in small steps, rather than thinking of this as a big bang project.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Ben, thanks. I’m with you there: Core Web Vitals will be one of 200+ rankings factors that Google uses. And likely not a huge one compared to content quality (search intent), UX signals, backlinks etc. etc. That said, I still think Core Web Vitals are something to pay attention to. In fact, we recently rolled out a few changes specifically designed to boost scores on some of our pages here at Backlinko.

      1. Brian, great research and we’ll probably use these as baselines with our clients so they can better understand what’s good and bad out there on the net.

        Did you do or plan to do any research on how the web vitals may have related to rankings?

        1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

          Thanks Curtis. Good question. We may run that analysis once the page experience update goes live in June. That way, we can see if there’s any correlation between CWVs and rankings.

  3. My site falls in the “Needs Improvement” category and scored ~70 on mobile with Lighthouse tests.

    Sometimes creating the best content using high-quality images, gifs, videos, embedded tweets, etc can’t be comprised and hurts the overall speed score. I’m trying to balance the two.

    I wonder what % of the 20,000 sites tested are WordPress sites and how many are using frameworks like React, Nuxt, Next.js etc.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Alon, I here you there. My posts have A LOT of stuff going on. Which can slow things down a lot. Like you said, it’s a balance for sure.

  4. Just one thing about Bounce Rate correlation, did you guys measure yourselves or used data already gathered?

    Because some people adjust bounce rate to not count after x seconds and AMP increases bounce rate by A LOT, as it considers AMP page as ‘leaving’ your page.

    So even though AMP will have a good impact on metrics, it will make Bounce Rate looks, wrongly, worse.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Matheus, we used Google Analytics data for each site.

  5. Great information Brian and Team it will help us a lot with our new website development and SEO.

    Thanks a lot!
    Olesya

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome, Olesya.

  6. Wow!! Thank you for the amazing insight I have just completed my website and I guess it is back to the drawing board. Thanks again for the share.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome, Jonathan.

  7. I must admit the findings of your study conflict with my own behaviour.

    Maybe it is necessary to only include first time ever visits to a site, otherwise users know what to expect and have made a choice to visit anyway.

    e.g. I know when I visit SEJ what to expect πŸ˜‰ I am happy with that tradeoff, and even read multiple pages

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      That’s a good point Andy. People will probably be MUCH more patient with a site they know vs. one they land on from Google or social media.

  8. It is interesting how these metrics intersects? What % of the messed websites cover all 3 metrics?

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Georgi, that would be interesting to look at. If I had to guess I’d say most sites with “poor” ratings for one metric had poor for the other two. But we’d have to analyze the data to be sure.

  9. Saket Avatar Saketsays:

    Useful stats Brian! I’ve doubts. How would this google update will affect for websites with shared hosting with CDN? Is the CDN useful? I’m a non technical guy managing my blog on my own. I don’t know much about technical SEO.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Saket. A CDN can help improve your page loading speed. So I recommend it.

  10. Did you guys see any strong correlation between ranking position and Core Web Vitals?

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Antonio, we didn’t look at that correlation becasue Google’s page experience update isn’t live yet. It would be really interesting to see how organic traffic to the site’s in this analysis change once the update rolls out.

  11. Arjun Avatar Arjunsays:

    Now that we have mobile first indexing, you really should have addressed the results of the mobile site performances.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Arjun, what do you mean? Mobile first indexing isn’t related to Core Web Vitals.

  12. I was hoping this article was going to provide tips for fixing these issues. ☹️

    I continue to have issues with core vitals that I can’t resolve.

  13. Interesting read Brian, thanks very much. Wondering what impact this will have on sites one they roll out the update.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Raphael, yes it will. My take is that it will have a relatively small impact. But I’ll be watching.

  14. Great post on Core Web Vitals! Thanks Brian.

    Do you have a plan to post regarding how to address the issues from Core Web Vitals like tools and services to fix the issues?

    Jason

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome, Jason. I cover the how-to side of things in this guide.

  15. This is something new & definitely needs to be looked at. Thanks for providing all the useful information.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      πŸ‘πŸ‘πŸ‘

  16. Thanks! Excellent report.
    I would like to see how this data is correlated with the position in Google search

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome, Ariel. We didn’t look at that because the update hasn’t rolled out yet. But that’s something we may take another look at.

      1. Yes, thanks.
        An idea for the next look, It would be good to see when the change is rolled out how it affects these sites on the ranking (comparing the ranking before and after the google update).

        1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

          πŸ‘πŸ‘πŸ‘

  17. Kevin Avatar Kevinsays:

    Great article! When does this Core Web Vitals go into effect for SERP?

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Kevin. It goes live in mid-June.

  18. Awesome study Brian. This is amazing.

    Thanks for putting so much time and effort into these posts!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome, Davis. Yup, these industry studies are a lot harder to do than a traditional list post. But they’re worth it.

  19. As always – great insight. Thank you. Curious if you have any feedback for top-performing/core web vitals-friendly wordpress themes for (some of us) who need improvements.

  20. Mark Avatar Marksays:

    I appreciate the hard work that went into this research and there’s some great data but not discussing the differences between desktop and mobile scores in a big disappointment to me.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Mark, thank you. And a fair point there.

  21. There was another report about core web vitals I saw the other day, It said that only 4% of website has a good score in CWV.
    Now, with your repprt It is interesting to see that almost half of the website are ready for CWV update.
    BTW, I think it was a good idea to have more info about the websites you analyzed and their industry.
    Thanks

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Salman, It could be differences in sampling between different studies. Or how they measured things. It’s hard to say without looking at the report you’re referring to.

  22. This is super interesting. I’ve been wondering how my site would compare to others. This provides a lot of context. Nice work.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Dan. Glad you found it useful.

  23. Very interesting Brian as it highlights for me the absolute necessity these days to take the web core vitals seriously.
    How problematic do you consider page builders such as Divi might be for core vitals or not an issue per se?

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Paul, I don’t think they’re necessarily an issue. In my experience, page builders can be slow. But not always. In fact, another study we did found that Squarespace actually had really high page speed scores vs other CMSs.

  24. Interesting. I chose to go the whole hog and invested considerable time, money and effort in drastically improving UX so I’m a little disappointed that (am I reading this right?) you didn’t find a strong correlation between UX and important metrics like time on site and bounce rate? I’m hoping the algorithm update mixes things up. But I fear not. What do you think Brian? A big change coming?

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Adrian, yes you read that right. But I wouldn’t consider it a waste of time. A good UX can help with CRO etc. But we didn’t find that Core Web Vitals specifically correlated with UX signals. Which was a little surprising.

  25. But the real question is how is WCV impacting ranks? after all is google pushing for something they believe is important, even if the study says is not that relevant, we are following google’s tail in order to rank in their search engines.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Daniel, Google will roll out the update in June. So we have to wait until then to really see.

  26. It’s excellent timing for this kind of study.

    The FID numbers conflict with my experience. It’s hard to find a subset of origins with such a bad FID. Also FID doesn’t depend on “Unused CSS” and “Cache Policy”.

    Treo did an overall analysis using 8m origins usingΒ CrUX data (the dataset behind page experience ranking): https://twitter.com/__treo/status/1392150803826216963

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Aleksey. Interesting stuff. I’ll look into Treo’s data.

  27. Thanks for sharing awesome data & analysis Brian. I have been following your blog and you on You tube since 2016, everytime you gave vital updates, guides, and suggestion.

    Nowadays, I am facing cache and website speed issue. Could you please suggest me best plugins for boosting website speed?

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome, Prem. I’m not the best person to ask about plugins. My team takes care of that side of things now.

  28. Matt Avatar Mattsays:

    I think it’s important to point out that this will be a small ranking factor. Basically a tiebreaker. For example, if Google has to choose between site A and site B, and site B is faster, it will rank site B higher. So speed is worth looking into and possibly making a few adjustments to improve, but not something to obsess over.

    https://www.seroundtable.com/google-site-speed-small-ranking-factor-29368.html

    http://search-off-the-record.googledevelopers.libsynpro.com/what-if-speed-was-a-ranking-factor

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Matt, I agree that it will be a small ranking factor. But the sources you linked to only talk about site speed. Not Core Web Vitals.

  29. Thanks a lot for this insightful information. Have spent a lot of time working on these metrics. I hope it will positively impact my website rankings. Thanks for the great work.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome, Suleiman.

  30. Awesome article Brian, I appreciate the time you and your team put into providing us with real data. So many sites claim everything under the sun, but I love to see measured accrual data! UX has been my main focus lately as our ranking are good, just trying to keep and convert more people on the site! Thank You!!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Cade. Absolutely: it’s easy to forget that the main benefit of good UX is more leads, sales etc. Increased rankings are just a nice bonus.

  31. Very interesting findings. Thought the shake would be bigger. Do you know approximately how many visitors a month a webpage must have before the Core Web Vitals data could be shown in the Google Search Console?

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Yvette, good question there. I’m actually not sure. I think it has more to do with site visits vs time (because the data is based on Chrome user data).

      1. We just did a study about Core Web Vitals in Germany (will be relased next week) and from our experience a website should have about 1.000 visitors so that Google can generate a CrUX Data set.

        1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

          Good to know, Thomas. Makes sense.

  32. Thank you for this excellent data-driven and very helpful blog post. We all need to improve our website speed that depends on various things. Thank you again.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      πŸ‘πŸ‘πŸ‘

  33. What I have noticed similar to your last post on CWV is that mobile GPS is a lot harder to optimize for. We have figured out a way with a certain WordPress builder, WP plugins to get high GPS on desktop but mobile is always in yellow unless you go full AMP and we won’t do that at least not now. Most sites have Google fonts, third party codes, or images that help with CBO that really can’t be removed or aren’t worth removing because they increase the user experience and help website owners track visitors better.

    Also, Google’s has seemed to back off it bit lately in verbiage and what they have said about CWV being a big factor. My guess it won’t be as big as a factor as they initially were trying to make it since there are has been feedback that this has turned into a CMS issue across the board but again as you mention slight boost for people that are getting good scores.

    Lastly, if you remember they announced Google Speed Update in January of 2018 but I didn’t notice it really hit until 6 months later in the summer of that year around June 2018. My guess is they might do the same with an announcement not much impact see feedback as it slowly rolls out and 6-12 mos. later make it more of a factor as people learn of the update. Most people don’t prepare for updates, they react to updates unless your in the industry.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hey TJ, good insights there. And I’m with you: this may or may not be a huge update. My guess is that it won’t be that impactful. As you said, otherwise it would hurt the rankings of a huge group of sites (lots of which have great content).

  34. This is a really great study Brian. These past few weeks I have been been working on my website speed and core web vitals and this study gives really good insights about how other website are performing in core web vitals. Now i’m just waiting for this update to roll out and lets see how this goes. Thanks for sharing your results.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Sounds good, Naresh.

  35. Hi Brian,
    Great info, thanks! Do you plan to check this again later and add a data update? I wonder how the improvement of these CWV affects the ranking in Google.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Andrew, thank you. I’d definitely like to look at this same dataset again to see how rankings change once Google rolls out the update.

      1. Don’t you think Page Experience Update already rolled out? Almost all of my site experiencing continuous decline in search traffic since last 30 days, also new pages are not getting indexed even within 2 week.

        All of my website either has bad LCP or has poor CLS. Don’t you think it’s already rolled out?

        1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

          Hi Rocky, I don’t think it’s rolled out yet. The fluctuations you’re seeing are probably part of another Google update (they roll out several per day).

      1. It is exciting how the result will change. But, of course, more than one factor may be involved. Thanks!

  36. Very interesting, heaven help all of us come mid-June now.

    I think everyone needs a lot more analysis like this to figure out how vitals will impact metrics in the real world once it goes live.

    LCP will be the biggest challenge for most for all the reasons listed, really good post.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Jeff. Glad you enjoyed the research.

  37. Hey Brian,

    Really loved the study. I am concerned about these scores on mobile device coz I found optimization for mobile is way more harder than for Desktop version.

    On top of that, will you update this content by insertion the co-relation between these scores and actually ranking after the roll out?

    Thanks!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome, Sakib. I would like to see how CWV impacts rankings. Would be interesting.

  38. Brian, thank you for the research πŸ‘. So Google will start Core Web in June and should finish it in August. But it seems that Core Web influences on SERP already, what do you think about this?

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome, Jerrick. I’ve seen some rankings fluctuations lately. But I don’t think they’re directly related to CWV.

  39. Dimitra Avatar Dimitrasays:

    Thank you for the research Brian!
    I’d like to ask, something that is yet not quite clear to me. I’ve noticed that for different pages of the same site, the cwv scores are different. So, that means that whenever we check our site for that, we will have to optimize every single page of it?! In larger sites, that could be madness

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome, Dimitra. That’s right: Google scores each page individually. That said, an issue that affects one page usually affects the rest (or at least most of them). So it’s not like you need to optimize each page one-by-one.

  40. Katsampu Avatar Katsampusays:

    Hey Brian, it was a huge analysis, impressive!

    I wonder however whether it’s a valuable info to tag a website as good / need improvement / bad.

    A website could be simultaneously all three, depending on the page.

    Furthermore, the kind of a website and their needs may be super different: a product page with many images, reviews, etc. will have a huge DOM, while a simple short home with a call to action will be very thin.

    Last, but not least, as Google’s Search Console relevant report and CrUX evaluate as of 75th percentile of user experiences.

    So, how do you suggest us to use your research’s data?

    Kindly,
    George.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi George, thank you. Those labels come directly from Google (specifically, Search Console). And based on their own guidelines. But yeah, I’m with you that CWV shouldn’t be the be all end all. Sometimes a slow page can actually have a great overall UX.

  41. Interesting article – thank you. For eCommerce stores on a platform, e.g. BigCommerce, I wonder how much of this comes down to the their backend and is out of our control?

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Angela, probably a big chunk is related to the backend (that’s true for any CMS). But I think there’s probably some code tweaks out there that could help.

  42. Hi Brian,

    That’s the first in-depth study anyone has done so far on CWVs. Do you recommend any plugin that can help us optimize our website according to the rules of Core Web Vitals?

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Maxab, in general there’s no single plugin that will solve all CWV issuees. In fact, 2/3 aren’t directly related to traditional site speed.

  43. P.Rane Avatar P.Ranesays:

    Hi Brian,

    Can you please write a step-by-step article on how to fix the core web vitals issue?

  44. Hey Brian,

    Thanks a lot for this data-driven blog post. It is going to help us a lot and we can improve the website performance and SEO with this. We are asking our developers to improve Core Web Vitals so that the upcoming algorithm doesn’t affect our site.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Sounds good Dinesh.

  45. Really good post Brian on CWV. As there is no relation between and CWV and user behaviour, you think there’d be a significant impact on ranking for the properties with poor CLS, FID and, LCP?

    Also, are these metrics begin taken into consideration by Google for ranking at this moment?

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Masoom, Google is going to make CWV part of the algorithm no matter what in mid-June. So right now it’s really time to work on CWV just in case it ends up being a significant update.

  46. Hi Brian. Great post and very surprising findings. I would have expected more sites to score lower.

    P.S.: in your article you said regarding CLS β€œA score of zero is considered ideal. And anything above .1 is rated as β€œgood” in Search Console.” I think you meant everything below .1 is Good.

    All the best,
    Radu

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Radu. You’re right: that’s a typo. I’ll fix it.

  47. Thank you Brian for this analysis. Now we know that we still have some work to do with our website. Best regards!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Sounds good πŸ‘πŸ‘πŸ‘

  48. Hi Brian,

    Thank you sharing this awesome analysis. We will wait to see how it is going to affect the websites that didn’t work properly on this issue.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      πŸ‘πŸ‘πŸ‘

  49. Hi Brian,

    This is very informative research.

    I am facing issue with LCP and CLS, trying to resolve this issue but google is taking 1 month to validate the fix so I have to wait. Is there any other way to fix it fast?

    I have 1 more query. Can I hide post date from google search meta description is it effect the search ranking?

    Thanks

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Sourabh, I’m not sure about why that is. It might be because Google needs a certain number of Chrome visitors to your site.

  50. You never disappoint! Another amazing article and a lot of useful info on what to focus on and fix before the new update. Thanks, Brian πŸ™‚ Can’t wait for the next one!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome, Luka. More cool stuff on the way.

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