Yes, it's true. The Core Web Vitals will become part of the ranking factors for Google's Search Result. Google is announcing Core Web Vitals will become ranking signals in May 2021 in an update that will also combine existing UX-related signals.
As announced by Google on 10 November 2020 on their blog, the Core Web Vitals will become part of the "search signals for page experience".
Now is the time to optimize your web applications and improve the user experience by taking a look at the Core Web Vitals.
First, the Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics made defined by the team behind web.dev. The Core Web Vitals are: LCP, FID, CLS (largest contentful paint, first input delay, cumulative layout shift).
Do you want to measure the user experience of real users? That's Why is the new way of collecting RUM data in a privacy friendly way.
New ranking signals May 2021
When they roll out this feature, the new page experience signals will combine the "Core Web Vitals" with the existing signals. At the moment of writing Google will be using the following items:
- Core Web Vitals
- Mobile-friendliness
- Safe-browsing
- HTTPS-security
- Intrusive interstitial guidelines
Visual loading experience
Also, Google is planning to show the loading experience in the search results. This way visitors can view the user experience of the specific page before loading it.
In addition to the timing updates described above, we plan to test a visual indicator that highlights pages in search results that have great page experience. (Jeffrey Jose, Product Manager on Search)
An example of the loading indicator is posted by Google Chromium's Blog.
Started in May 2020
Back in May 2020, Google announced that they are considering the use of the Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor.
We believe user engagement will improve as experiences on the web get better -- and that by incorporating these new signals into Search, we'll help make the web better for everyone. We hope that sharing our roadmap for the page experience updates and launching supporting tools ahead of time will help the diverse ecosystem of web creators, developers, and businesses to improve and deliver more delightful user experiences.
Want to know more? Google posted more information on their blog, Timing for bringing page experience to Google Search.
Single Page Applications
During the development of That's Why (a tool to monitor real user experience) we saw some interesting things that could impact the rankings for SPA's in Google's organic & ad search results.
Take a look at this tweet:
At this moment it's not clear how Google will handle single-page applications in combination with its upcoming ranking factor change. Google will use the CrUX (Chrome User Experience Report) to determine what the user experience on a page is.
ps, I created a simple tool that shows the Chrome user experience report for a site.
My colleague, Allan de Wit (from That's Why), also made a post about the changes, you can read his article here.