According to information from a recent Searchmetrics analysis, a majority of websites are threatened with a loss in ranking because they do not fulfill the Core Web Vitals’ requirements for user experience. There are three factors that are decisive for this assessment: how quickly the website loads, how quick its reaction time is, and its visual stability.
It has been known for over a year now that the Core Web Vitals will serve as the new method of assessment for Google starting in May. Google even pushed the start date back by a month. Yet, barely any websites have taken the time to get familiar with the Core Web Vitals and optimize accordingly. For an overview on this topic, please reference Google’s FAQs for the Core Web Vitals and Page Experience. As of May 2021, over 3/4 of all websites currently fail to pass all thresholds.
Searchmetrics analyzed two million websites based in the US, Great Britain, and Germany – and the percentages were shocking. For example, desktop and mobile sites in Germany were over 80%, almost 100% non-compliant with Google’s guidelines. If change does not occur, consequences will be felt in June.
In the future, LCP, FID, and CLS metrics will play a strong role in page evaluations. These metrics will fundamentally support Google’s main goals: to optimize websites for visitors and to massively improve user-friendliness.
On the other hand, the exact reasons for poor results were determinable through the analysis: bad evaluation results were caused, for example, because many sites suddenly had too many layout changes, or the reaction time of sites was too slow. A positive example from the results, though, was Wikipedia.
