New 'Web Vitals' = Google's Answer to Great User Experience

In a Chrome Dev blog post titled, Introducing Web Vitals: essential metrics for a healthy site, Google announced their new Web Vitals initiative.

According to Google, this latest initiative was designed to "provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web. "

This blog post was seriously packed with information, but the most important was the definition of the Core Web Vitals and the factors it includes...

Core Web Vitals
Measuring the quality of user experience has many facets. While some aspects of user experience are site and context-specific, there is a common set of signals — "Core Web Vitals" — that is critical to all web experiences. Such core user experience needs include loading experience, interactivity, and visual stability of page content, and combined are the foundation of the 2020 Core Web Vitals.

• Largest Contentful Paint measures perceived load speed and marks the point in the page load timeline when the page's main content has likely loaded.

  
  

• First Input Delay measures responsiveness and quantifies the experience users feel when trying to first interact with the page.

  
  

• Cumulative Layout Shift measures visual stability and quantifies the amount of unexpected layout shift of visible page content.

All of these metrics capture important user-centric outcomes, are field measurable, and have supporting lab diagnostic metric equivalents and tooling. For example, while Largest Contentful Paint is the topline loading metric, it is also highly dependent on First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Time to First Byte (TTFB), which remain critical to monitor and improve.

Yes, this change looks to have the potential to seriously shift the se...