Upcoming Google Update May 2021
So, if you don’t know already, Google updates its algorithm like every freaking day(thanks for giving our SEO staff a constant headache!).
And as you can probably tell from the title, Google made another significant update recently. While the core aim of google is the same as ever. “To provide a great user-experience”
For technical details. This is what happened.
Google already had the following pre-existing metrics for evaluation of “user experience”.
- HTTPS security
- Safe browsing
- Mobile-friendliness
- Intrusive interstitial guidelines
What was added?
(The core web vitals) To improve the way Google evaluates the user experience, google added 3 core web vitals
- LCP
- FID
- CLS
● Largest Contentful Paint(LCP): This is the time it takes to load the page’s largest/main content. This starts from the time user requests the page, till the content loads. The content itself typically would be an image, video, large chunks of text, or maybe all of these, depending on your website. According to Google, the ideal time for LCP is less than or equal to(used to be just less than previously) 2.5 seconds.
● First Input Delay(FID): This is the time it takes for your page to process and respond to whatever first interaction user requests on your page. For instance, if a user clicks on a button on your page for the first time after entering the page, the time it took for the page to respond with the action associated with the respective button. The time boundary for this is 100 ms or less.
● Cumulative Layout Shift: CLS basically means the number of layout shifts that take place on the page, that the user “wasn’t” expecting. The range is 0(being no unexpected shifts; good) to 1(being most unexpected shifts; poor) Ideally, you should aim for 0.1 or less.
So far, these are the time boundaries of respective metrics. But knowing Google, it won’t be surprising that they change the boundaries over time. Yeah so, website owners need to have their metric scores optimized and watch out for any new updates as usual.
