Eighteen months ago, back in June 2020, Google informed us that there was going to be a Core Web Vitals rollout sometime in the future in 2021. It wasn’t the first time that Google had given a pre-warning in the hope that websites would be improved in advance but the rollout itself has not gone smoothly.
Core Web Vitals are metrics that look at web users’ experiences such as page loading and speed when interactive or stable. It is grouped alongside Page Experience metrics. Its importance to websites is that the Google criteria for Core Web Vitals will affect Google Top Stories i.e. what will appear at the top of search results. With such an important effect on ranking, developers have been keen to monitor the change in Google SERPS.
Core Web Vitals Timeline
After Google’s initial statement in May 2020, we were advised in November 2020 that the rollout of Core Web Vitals would happen in May 2021. This did seem like a lot of notice, but it gave us time to absorb the impact and improve the performance of our web pages.
Next Google let us know in April 2021 that the update was going to suffer a delay until June 2021. In fact, in June there was only a slow rollout that did not fully complete until September 2021.
So, what happened to make this update take an unprecedented 18 months?
What went wrong?
The long lead-in time and the delays in rolling out the Core Web Vitals suggest that Google itself did not see the kind of improvements on web performance that they hoped would be triggered by their announcement.
Could it have been that without sufficient tweaks in performance, sites would not rank, which would have defeated the object of an efficient and successful search algorithm?
The issue with this is that it sends out conflicting messages to businesses that are keen to rank high.
Here Comes Some Data
Using Mozcast to monitor Google algorithms Tom Capper from moz.com tracked the Top 20 ranking URLs for each of 10,000 keywords back in May. He found that only 29% of the URLs in the results had CrUX data. Since this CrUX data is the basis for Core Web Vitals, you can see that the percentage is disappointingly low.
Google made some assurances that it would guestimate data for those without the essential CrUX data, but this isn’t effective on untemplated smaller sites.
So, what did the Core Web Vitals look like for the 29% of URLs? Google has been unable to assure us whether a page needs to pass all 3 thresholds to get a boost to performance. They have simply said that sites should attempt to meet the thresholds. Of the 29%, only 30.75% passed all thresholds. That is a very poor show and will probably include only household names.
It seems very likely that this low level of performance led to Google delaying the update. More recent analysis suggests that performance is improving as more websites make the appropriate changes and Google collects more data.
What about the future for Core Web Vitals?
If the trend in performance increases, then it is expected that Google will factor Core Web Vitals further in ranking status. Until then Web developers will be using analytics to keep an eye on performance and work on making improvements to the user experience.
