In a SEO Subreddit, someone asked if he should block countries that have slow internet connection from accessing his site, in order to improve his field scores in the core web vitals.
As a backgrounder, the user has excellent lab scores for his core web vitals, however, has needs improvement or poor for his field scores. He gets traffic from countries with a slow connection which increases the usual load time from 2 seconds to 20 seconds. In addition, these visitors from these slow connection countries have higher bounce rate, are unlikely to convert, and contribute to a lot of spam.
John Mueller responded and mentioned how if a country is skewing the overall core web vitals results, then that means that the site is getting significant traffic from that country. And if this was the case, blocking the country or countries would result in a significant loss of traffic.
Mueller then went on and recommended how to see user metrics for different countries using Bigquery. If you are interested in this, you can check the whole discussion and recommendation at this Reddit thread.
Other users have mixed opinion with regards to blocking slow countries or not, though the general consensus is that it is a bad idea.
Questions were also raised on how big of an issue the field scores are and how much of a ranking factor is the core web vitals to warrant the blocking of users. What do you think of it?
Curious about the Core Web Vitals and wondering if it is a ranking factor? Check out our Core Web Vitals article.