Optimizing your website for the quality of user experience is crucial for its long-term success. Whether you're a business owner, marketer, or developer, Web Vitals can assist you in quantifying your site's experience and identifying opportunities for improvement.
Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals necessary to deliver a great user experience on the web.
Google has developed various tools over the years to measure and report on performance. While some developers are experts at using these tools, others find it challenging to keep up with the abundance of tools and metrics.
Site owners shouldn't have to be performance experts to understand the quality of experience they are delivering to their users. The Web Vitals initiative aims to simplify the landscape and help sites focus on the metrics that matter most, which are the Core Web Vitals.
Core Web Vitals are the subset of Web Vitals that apply to all web pages, should be measured by all site owners, and will be surfaced across all Google tools. Each of the Core Web Vitals represents a distinct facet of the user experience, is measurable in the field, and reflects the real-world experience of a critical user-centric outcome.
Web Vitals and Core Web Vitals represent the best available signals developers have today to measure quality of experience across the web, but these signals are not perfect and future improvements or additions should be expected.
The Core Web Vitals are relevant to all web pages and featured across relevant Google tools. Changes to these metrics will have wide-reaching impact; as such, developers should expect the definitions and thresholds of the Core Web Vitals to be stable, and updates to have prior notice and a predictable, annual cadence.
The other Web Vitals are often context or tool specific, and may be more experimental than the Core Web Vitals. As such, their definitions and thresholds may change with greater frequency.
For all Web Vitals, changes will be clearly documented in this public CHANGELOG.
