Overview of Google Search Consoles Web Vitals Report

Justin Taylor - October 7, 2020

You may have heard about Google’s new core web vital statistics that are going to be part of the upcoming Page Experience ranking signal, likely to be rolled out sometime in 2021. Ensure that your website is meeting these new “requirements,” by digging into your Google Search Console.

Within it, there is a section called Core Web Vitals which is broken out into the Mobile report and the Desktop report. The reason that these are separated is that mobile and desktop devices have different considerations in how they load a web page, therefore, they might face different issues and have different results when it comes to passing or not passing these new core web vitals standards.

In the Desktop report Google breaks out core performing pages and which pages need improvement, including the type of issue. (The Mobile report is structured the same way.) Issues are broken into three new core web vital rankings LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), FID (First Input Delay) or CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift). For explanations of these new metrics, please check out this blog post from a few weeks ago.

Interestingly, if Google finds an issue, they won’t tell you all of the pages that are problematic. Google Search Console will give you up to 20 urls that follow that same pattern and have the same issue. From there, you need to analyze that group and try to identify the elements on the loading page or in the template that are causing the problem.

Next, it’s a matter of identifying solutions to remedy the issue and then assessing whether the benefits of making the changes to the page(s) are worth the time and resources. The number of pages that are impacted and the costs (time and resources) should help you determine the importance / viability of fixing the issue.

If you’d like our opinion on whether your website is “up to code” and what will be involved in “fixing,” please reach out.