Google has a podcast called Search Off the Record, which–from the episodes I’ve heard–features roundtable discussions among Googlers (people who work for Google).
SEO-related subjects are often topics for discussion.
Yesterday, on October 21, 2021, the 25th episode was published on YouTube.
This episode, which was hosted by John Mueller (Search Advocate). John was joined by Martin, Annie, and Vivek. This episode, as its title implies, focused on Core Web Vitals.
They start by going into a bit of a historical context: for years, Google and webmasters have been concerned about speed–specifically, page speed.
There are some key factors that people wondered about: server speed, connection/bandwidth, your device, etc.
And throughout the years, Google has tried to come up with some metrics that are reflective of the user experience, respect privacy, and are still (somewhat) accurate measurements of a page’s speed.
Eventually, Google settled (at least for now) on 3 key metrics that help make up Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift.
Vivek said, “What we did with these metrics was really take a user-focused perspective: what does the user see, what do they experience, and what do they encounter?
“And then, from that, tried to derive what we actually want the browser and the web technologies to do..”
When Martin asked Vivek to define, in one sentence, each of Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift.
Vivek then said, “So, Largest Contentful Paint basically measures how long it takes for the user to see the most meaningful part of the page’s content.”
(Personally, I’m more in favor of a definition found on Web.dev: ‘largest image or text block visible within the viewport, relative to when the page first started loading.’)
Anyway, Vivek continued: “First Input Delay is how long it takes for the page to respond to a user’s input.”
That seems straightforward. Web.Dev has a page on First Input Delay (FID) where you can get more info: https://web.dev/fid/
About Cumulative Layout Shift, Vivek said that “Cumulative Layout Shift is all about page stability.”
I think that’s probably the shortest way of defining Cumulative Layout Shift.
So, if you’d like more details as to the history of, the why, and the how of Core Web Vitals, this episode makes for an interesting listen.
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