Core Web Vitals for Small Businesses: How To Pass The CWV Assessment

Did you know 1 in 2 visitors abandon a website that takes more than 6 seconds to load?

You may think that sounds extreme, but it’s pretty reasonable.

In a digitally connected world, people expect a quick and easy user experience, especially on mobile.

Google agrees. Page experience signals such as page loading speed are now among the factors that help you rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).

In other words, you should be concerned with page experience. Google wants to make sure people get the answers they’re looking for and have an enjoyable user experience.

This Google metric measures the user experience that visitors have when they arrive at your page. As you rack up visits, you have the opportunity to convert them into sales and grow your audience.

Core Web Vitals are crucial to your website’s growth, no matter the quality of your content.

I know keeping up with Google feels like a full-time job. I’m here to help you through it.

If you’re struggling with Core Web Vitals, let me explain why you need to keep working on them.

Let’s get technical.

What Is Core Web Vitals and Why Is It Important?

Core Web Vitals are a little complex, so let’s break them down.

CWV affects algorithms based on Google’s page experience metric, which measures “how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its pure information value.”

Core Web Vitals take three metrics into account:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP or load time): How long a page’s primary content— including large elements like a hero picture or header—takes to load. A good score is 2.5 seconds or less.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS or visual stability): The amount a page’s layout shifts after loading. This is a measure of your site’s visual stability.
First Input Delay (FID or interactivity): The amount of time that passes from when a user performs an action on your site (like clicking a link or button) to when the browser responds to that action.

A screenshot of a glossary of words, including LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), FID (First Input Delay), CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), FCP (First Contentful Paint), TTFB (Time to First Byte), DOM Content Loaded, and Onloaded.

As a small business owner, digital marketer, or website developer, you can improve your Core Web Vitals to enhance your website’s user experience. If your page isn’t loading fast enough, visitors will bounce and you can lose your rank position to a page that loads more efficiently.

This is why Core Web Vitals are so key for small business SEO. Besides keeping your website organized and clean, strong CWV scores help your website rank higher and gain more recognition.

By prioritizing page experience, you can pass Core Web Vitals.