Google search results is one of the most important sources of traffic for many websites. So, it is very important to optimise our website based on Google's ranking algorithm.

Google never reveals their exact algorithm responsible for the search result ranking. But, they do write articles about the development updates and things that we need to take care of on our website. These things do help us understand what is being considered as important by Google. And what can impact the ranking of the website.

One of the latest improvements that we need to do on our website to optimise our site based on the core web vitals. The core web vitals are few parameters based on which Google detects the page experience for a user. Now they will not make this as the only criteria for search result ranking. But, when there is content with similar relevance websites with better core vital scores can outperform.

Let's look at a few things that we need to improve upon to ensure that we don't lose in this race of search result ranking. Some items that we already know are like running a website on https, your website being mobile friendly so on and so forth.

Now what are core vitals? Core Web Vitals are the subset of Web Vitals that apply to all web pages, should be measured by all site owners, and will be surfaced across all Google tools. So, is this definition telling us? What are the parameters based on which we need to improve our website?

Largest contentful paint

The first one being the largest contentful paint or LCP. This is an indicator of the performance of a website or you can say how much time does it take for a page to show something meaningful to the user. Google recommends that your LCP score should be less than 2.5 seconds. Now this means we need to look at things like the first byte time, the caching strategies and other stuff.

First input delay FID

One more aspect which as part of the core web vitals is the first input delay for the user. Now if this thing seems too technical, let's try to simplify this. Whenever a user tries to interact with your website some kind of event happens on the page. This event can range from clicking a link to typing something in an input field. Now, if these interactions are not happening within 100ms, the user might feel that your site is slow. And this is also one parameter which Google is considering for search result ranking. Your first input delay can increase because the browser is busy downloading some heavy files. And hence it becomes very important for you to optimise your files.

Cumulative layout shift

You don't want on a website for things to keep changing their positions, do you? Just imagine you are about to click a link and suddenly because of some layout shift that link is now gone. Google understands that this kind of layout shift can result in a bad User experience. And hence they can penalize you on their search result ranking. Layout shifts can happen for many reasons. Third party scripts and contents being a very common reason for such layout changes. So we need to optimise our site and ensure that these kinds of layout shifts don't happen in a way that can be disturbing for the user.

Google has mentioned on their website that the Core web vitals will come into effect from the end of august 2021. This means we should get serious about these criteria and ensure that our website is geared up for these rankings.

There are tools already available for us to measure these aspects of a website. Google Chrome developer tools, lighthouse are some of the available tools which we can use to measure these factors of a website full stop so what are you waiting for? Get started and see how well you are doing on these criteria.