According to StatCounter, a web traffic analysis website, Google has overwhelming dominance as a search engine. It has an 81 percent market share on desktop devices and 94 percent on mobile. Appearing high up on search results is vital for businesses, so websites are always anxious to maintain and improve their Google search rankings.
In May, last year. Google had announced that the next upcoming change in 2021 will have to do with website performance — how quickly a page loads in the browser after a user navigates to the site.
It’s been a big factor for some time, in part because mobile usage has exploded. Hence it is a priority in terms of Google’s algorithm.
Google’s announcement about its upcoming search ranking update spotlighted Core Web Vitals. It is a collection of metrics to quantify the “user experience” factor of a website
The first metric calculates how long it takes the website to load its largest visible piece of content, such as an image, video, or large block of text.
The second criteria measures how quickly a website performance becomes responsive once the user navigates to it.
The third metric is how much a website’s layout shifts during the page loading process. This problem, known as “cumulative layout shift,” is what causes the frustrating experience of having the text you were reading suddenly shift out of view.
Page performance is going to be increasingly important for determining search rank in the future.