Speed has long been an official ranking factor, but with the introduction of the Core Web Vitals (CWV), many an SEO might have noticed the ominous Pass/Fail assessment within PageSpeed Insights.
Methodology
Core Web Vitals are evaluated on a per URL basis
A couple of caveats:
- All results were scraped from a search in Berkshire, UK.
- No rich result URLs were included.
- 10th position is excluded as so few SERPs had 10 organic listings, making the sample size considerably lower.
- A handful of results had featured snippets. These are classified as position 1 but may not be the ‘true’ 1st position.
- Some sites appeared across multiple rankings (e.g. Wikipedia)
- Several URLs could not be analyzed in PSI for various reasons.
A Bit on Core Web Vitals
For anyone reading that may not be aware of the core web vitals – those are the three metrics that Google will use to judge the page experience. and will become an official ranking factor some time in 2021.
Why? To help move the Web forward, encouraging site owners to provide a better experience for users – and possibly helping Google render the Web a little faster and more efficiently at the same time. Win-win
They are recorded using the Actual User Metric (rUM) from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX). (Google Search may also use laboratory data where CrUX is not available, but the analysis below focuses on rUM). PageSpeed ​​Insights (PSI) then reports on the 75th percentile (25% of slowest loads) of this data,
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. To provide good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
- First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.
To pass the Core Web Vitals assessment, a URL needs to be considered ‘good’ in all three metrics.
What Did the Data Highlight?
As suspected only a small proportion of sites ended up passing the CWV assessment – shock! From our list of URLs, only 12% mobile and 13% desktop passed the CWV assessment.
Excluding those without rUM brought this to 23% and 24% respectively.
What’s more interesting is looking at individual pass rates for each ranking position:
A large part of the CWV evaluation focuses on load speed, which we know is already a ranking factor. Therefore, logic would suggest that faster sites may rank slightly higher and pass the evaluation in return.
However, Google consistently comments that speed is a minor factor. Instead, I suspect that sites ranking in the first 1-4 positions are better optimized overall. With targeted, rich and user-friendly content. All while loading this information more efficiently.
break the vitals
We can also look at individual metrics at a more granular level.
What Can You Take Away from This?
Well, not a whole lot… (sorry). This is still a fairly small sample, and Core Web Vitals are not an official ranking factor just yet and won’t be till 2021. Meaning their true impact is yet to be seen.
But if you do happen to load up PageSpeed Insights and see the disheartening ‘fail’ message. Fear not, you’re in good company with most other sites.
Will passing the assessment immediately boost your rankings? Probably not. Should you strive to pass it anyway? Definitely.
Regardless of how much ranking benefit speed and CWV’s provide, having your pages as quick, responsive, and stable as possible is great for users and search engines alike.
If you’re looking to make improvements, PageSpeed Insights is a great place to start. And you can easily grab data across your entire site with the SEO Spider and steps here.
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