306: Core Web Vitals - What Food Bloggers Need to Know About User Experience and Google with Andrew Wilder

Hey, folks, Bjork here jumping on kind of for a fun episode here. It's a shorter one. It's a conversation that happened on a live Q and A for Food Blogger Pro. For Food Blogger Pro members. You know what these are. For those of you who aren't members, this is a little bit of a sneak peek into a live Q and A. It's actually just the first part of the conversation that we're having with Andrew Wilder from NerdPress. And the live Q&As happen for food Blogger Pro members every month. And we talk about a specific subject. Sometimes we have like a general Q and A, but usually it's a specific subject. And this time we were talking to Andrew about this idea of Core Web vitals and all of the information that comes along with that. And we had this great conversation before we even got into the Q and A section, which we're not going to include, that that's kind of members Only content. But we wanted to chunk out this section that Andrew shared about everything that's happening and everything that you need to know. Kind of the foundational knowledge around these kind of movements that we hear from Google prioritizing things like Content Layout Shift and Largest Contentful Paint, all of these different abbreviations and. And implementations of, you know, ad technology and. And there's just a lot of considerations around it. So excited to share this with you, and my hope is that you have some takeaways. When I was listening to Andrew explain.

It, I was like, gosh, we got.

To share this on the podcast. And then after Alexa was like, what do you think about sharing that first part on the podcast?

I was like, yes, totally. Let's do it so we can roll the tape.

This is Andrew talking about some of the movements coming from Google and how that impacts the search algorithm and some things for you to consider as a publisher. So let's take it away. Andrew. Hello.

Hello, everybody.

Andrew, welcome to the live Q and A. Hello.

Happy to be alive.

It's going to be a great conversation here. We already have some good questions coming in. We are talking today about page experience, Core web vitals. What happened was this conversation came up in Slack for our team, the Food Blogger Pro team. We got to do Q and A on this. I was like, how about we also do Andrew as a guest because you know a lot about this. So. So my guess is most people will be familiar with you and what you do from past podcasts, live Q&As. We might even have some nerd press folks here. Nerd do you have, like, an internal name for them?

Nerd.

Nerd pressers like NPs. You got to come. If you don't have one, you should come up with one.

One thing we figured out is, you know how, like, if you have, you know, you have a flock of seagulls, right? Or, well, if you have a group of nerds, it's called an awkward.

Okay.

So awk. Words.

Yes. Yes. Which is kidding even in saying it. So we'd love to hear a little bit about your background real quick as we jump into it, Andrew.

And then as Andrew sharing his background.

Would love to hear Anybody who's tuning in live, where you're tuning in from.

Maybe your site's name or if you're.

Just on social, where that is. And drink of choice. That's kind of what we go with. We.

Before we pressed record.

We both have an ember mug, which is awesome. I'm not using it because I have a cold press right now. So what yours is a coffee? A tea. Is that what you're kicking?

I got some black coffee in here. Yeah.

Nice. And then your background, Andrew.

Hi. So I've always been interested in websites since I was a kid, or computers, I guess. We didn't have websites going back that far. So for years, I dabbled with websites on the side. And then in the late 2000s, through a career change, I started a food blog in 2010, actually, and got into the food blogging space. And then when other food bloggers found out, I knew what I was talking about with tech stuff. They're like, can I hire you? And things kind of grew from there. And oh my gosh, we're 11 years later and my food blog still exists. It's sadly neglected, but it's still around. And we are now basically focused on website support and maintenance just for WordPress websites of this community. Most of our clients happen to be food bloggers. So we do have some other e commerce clients and other lifestyle bloggers and some nonprofits and foundations. But, like, 95% of our clients, I think, are in the food space and.

Wellness space, which is awesome because your background is that you understand food. You had a food site, and so it's an area that you know and like. And then also one of the things that I love about your story is one of the things that we find is sometimes.

A pursuit, in this case.

Of food blogging can be a gateway to another successful career. And we've seen that multiple times where somebody will get into it and they'll be like, oh my gosh, I love video and I didn't realize that before. And then they build a successful career in video. And for you, building a successful company, multiple employees, with supporting other food creators, which is great. And today we're going to be talking about something that I'm guessing you've been talking about with a lot of nerd pressings. Okay. And that is page experience and core web vitals. So this is an important consideration, kind of something that Google has pushed out and said. We think this is a priority.

And in the food space where search.

Is so important, anytime Google says something, everybody pays attention to that and wants to make sure that they are making Google happy. And our goal in this conversation is to make sure we understand what it is and understand how we can improve it. But before we get into the specifics, we have to understand what is this thing that you hear people talking about? Can you lay some foundational knowledge for us to build on as we get into these questions?

Sure. Google, in May of last year, I think it was said, hey, we're going to release this new algorithm change. We don't know when it's going to be exactly, but it'll be like, we'll give you six months notice and it'll be sometime in 2021. So we got basically a year's heads up and we're all like, okay, what do we do with that? But at least we knew it was coming at some point. And then in novemb they said, hey, okay, we're going to launch this in May of 2021. About a month ago, they decided to postpone it till mid June. So we. Because they realized people weren't ready even with the warning. And that's. We'll talk about some of the nitty gritty, but it's because it's hard. This is really hard to do. So they already had the Page Experience algorithm, actually. So this is really just an expansion of it. So Google, they use these algorithms that are like hundreds of ranking factors. Some of them we know, very few of them we know. Yeah. Then the rest we have to deduce what. What is a ranking or what is Google looking for? Right. And that's.

What are the ones that we know? What would those be?

So, well, the Page Experience ones are some that they tell us actually. Right, sure. So existing Page Experience algorithm factors or ranking factors that existed before or that exist now and have been for a few years. Is your site mobile friendly, for example? Right. And they switched to a mobile first indexing. So like that's Actually, like if your site's not mobile friendly, you will not rank as well.

Yeah.

It's literally that simple. Right. Because they're really pushing for mobile web because that's what people are doing. Is your site safe? Has it been hacked? Right. Is there any malware on it? So that's actually a ranking factor. Right.

So HTTPs versus that's the other one. Yeah, Yep.

So because I think it was 2014 or maybe earlier where they said, hey, this is going to be a ranking factor, you know, so Google makes these decrees. They say, we want to make the web a better place. We could argue whether or not Google should be the ones doing that, but they do, I think in terms of HTTPs, I totally agree. It's great that we're all SSL now. It's actually faster too. They're pushing technology forward this way. Another one of them that many people have probably heard is no intrusive interstitials. If you click through from a search result to a site and then you get this big pop up right away that gets in the way of your content, that can actually penalize you in the rankings because it's interfering with your experience of going from Google and getting your answer.

Yep.

So all of the ones we just mentioned already exist. They're part of the page experience. So what's happening now is they've created this metric called or group of metrics, I guess, called Core Web Vitals. And right now they're starting with three specific metrics and they've said this will probably evolve. So once a year they're going to revisit this and say, hey, there's a new metric, or we're changing this metric. This is going to be a moving target. So it's not a set it for and you're good for 10 years kind of thing. But basically they're looking at improving user experience as part of this. And part of that is site speed. You want to make sure the site loads fast. Part of that is that the site is interactive. When you swipe or slide through, it doesn't lag or you tap a button and it actually responds. Then part of that is visual effects, visual stability. How many times have you gone to click on a button and an ad pops up and it pushes down and then you click on the ad by accident.

Super annoying.

So that's. That's the third one. So they're basically. They've set measurements and criteria for those three metrics or for three metrics, which we can. We should talk about in a sec and said hey, you have to hit this score or better.

Yep.

And either you pass or you don't pass by passing that specific score. It's the same score for every website. Doesn't matter if you're a food blog or facebook or google.com and then either you pass all three metrics or you don't.

Yeah, it's like a pass fail. Yep, yep.

They say pass does not pass. Okay, let's not use the word fail.

Yeah, sure. So do we know how much that actually impacts?

That's your result question. Big, big question right Now. Google has said this will not cause massive ranking changes when they roll this out.

Okay.

I want to stress that your site will not change rankings because of this in mid June. Like the change will probably be imperceptible. There might be a couple of sites that move up or down a couple of spots, but you probably won't notice it. So Google has said, first of all, they're rolling it out slowly. So they're going to start rolling it out mid June and then it'll fully roll out by the end of August. And then they've said over time it will become more important.

Sure.

And part of that is as more sites get on top of this and improve their metrics, it becomes more of a ranking factor. But yeah, you know, right now like 10 or 15% of sites even match this. Sure. So the trick is, because we know it's a ranking factor, everybody's glommed onto that and said, oh, we should fix this.

It's super important because we don't have that many things that we do know are ranking factors. So when there is something everybody kind of, there's a big to do about it. It's like, oh my gosh, we got to make sure that we do this because now we actually know this. Google's going to rank this or this is going to be a ranking factor. So if we know, we got to improve it.

Right. And so I say that because like you shouldn't ignore it. But don't panic. You know, like we're getting emails from people freaking out because they're afraid June 1st their rankings are going to drop. And I can tell you right now, if your rankings drop, it's not because of this.

Sure.

There may be other reasons. Right. And Google posted a frequently asked questions on this and they even underscored repe repeatedly. Content is the most important thing. Answer the user's query intent. Like when somebody searches for the best gluten free chocolate chip cookies, give them the best gluten Free chocolate chip cookies. And if your site takes a little bit longer, if your recipe's better, it's still going to rank well.

Yeah, I think that's a really important reminder because sometimes I think to your point, it can seem like, wait a minute, if I don't do this, then I'm going to get cut off and I'm not going to get any more search traffic.

And it's more of like the culmination.

Of 200 different things that you're doing well, of which the most important is content. All those other variables, core web vitals, a fast site, you know, no interstitials like those all become multipliers on really good content.

So if you have really good content.

And you check all the boxes off for the other recommendations or best practices, awesome.

If you have super crummy content and.

You check all the boxes of the recommendations, it's like a multiplier on zero.

Right?

0 times 100 times 100 times 100 times 100 is zero. And you got to start with that core foundation of technology, which I think is such a great takeaway.

So should we jump into some of.

These specific questions that are coming in or anything else that you want to say to lay the foundation?

Let me explain what the three scores are actually, because I think that will be helpful. There's three specific metrics that they're now tracking as part of the core web vitals. The first measures how fast your site loads. It's called largest Contentful Paint or lcp. What that's doing is saying, how long does it take when you hit go on the URL for the biggest thing above the fold to show up before you scroll in your first view on mobile is your title, the thing, your header, whatever the biggest thing is in terms of dimensions, how long does that take take to load and display? They basically picked biggest as a proxy for most important.

Sure.

There's another metric called first Contentful Paint, where it's like, how long does it take for anything to show up? That metric is still part of the site speed overall, but they've said, well, okay, largest is more important. Depending on what that is and when it loads in the sequence that's going to change your score. The target to hit with that is 2.5 seconds or faster. So if your largest thing, whatever it is, takes less than two and a half seconds, then you're good. Oh, I should also mention the way this stuff is measured. It's actually they're looking at real world measurements. So many of you are familiar with Google Page Speed Insights where you can run a test and in the lab data, it'll show you the simulated 3G test where we're like, hey, we're pretending this is a slow phone and here's this core. But what Google's actually using for the rankings is what's called the Chrome User Experience Report, or Crux crux. And what that is is basically they're looking at people using the Chrome web browser. That browser is sending back those timing data to Google. So it's real world. It's real world user data. So if your users are on lots of slow devices, like if you happen to be on a blog where that's maybe you're focused on budget stuff and users are likely to have slower phones or slower.

Tools for rural communities with slow Internet access.com? yeah.co.uk.

Yeah, so that's. Since it's a real world metric, we're talking about actual, like, I've got an Android phone with a Chrome browser. If it takes 2.4 seconds for that largest element to load, we're good. If it takes 2.6, we're not. And so all of that data is being sent back and it takes time to collect that data. So chrome looks at 28 days of data. So when you make a change, it actually needs 28 more days to collect more data to show you this.

Interesting.

So even if you improve it the next day, you check it, that one day is going to be one day of improved content and 27 days of non improved content.

Yes. And that's, I think, one of the reasons why they've had to delay this rollout because it takes so much time to really like, tweak and make sure it's working and see results. So let me, let me get back to the three metrics. So we've got largest contentful paint. Then the second one is a measurement of interactivity. That's first input delay. That's basically like when you try to do something, how long does it take? In our experience, most food blogs don't have a problem with this. The metric to hit is 100 milliseconds or less, so a tenth of a second. So basically it has to feel responsive. Unless there's something really wrong with your site, you're probably fine on this one unless you've loaded up with tons of JavaScript. That's really bogging down. Then the third one, and this is really the hardest one, it's a measurement of visual stability and it's called cumulative layout shift CLS that's basically a measurement of how much do things move around on the page and get in your way. The crazy thing with this is basically all layout shifts are treated equally. If it's like the page is loading and stuff is moving, that counts as layout shifts versus you're reading through and an ad loads and pushes your content down, down, which is really. That's when it's really annoying. Right. That is counted as well. So this is where we're spending most of our site speed optimization time on CLS is really hard and I think we'll get into some more details on that. But the metric on that is 0.1 or lower is what you want to hit to pass.

What does that metric represent?

It's some crazy calculation that they keep changing. Yeah, super helpful. Basically, they've come up with this scoring system for cls.

Yeah, it's like a CLS score, which is.

And it basically looks at how big the thing is that moves and how much it moves.

Sure.

But then it's a cumulative shift. So if you're scrolling down and something shifts again, it shifts again. You can actually install a. You can install a Chrome browser extension that'll show it to you in real time. It'll calculate it and say, oh, you know, as an ad pops in, suddenly you see the score go up.

Yeah. And what is that? Do you know what that extension is called?

If people.

I can tell you in just a second. There's a few of them. I just found it. I'll drop it in the chat here real quick.

Okay.

That's awesome. Awesome. There are a few that out there. This happens to be the one I'm using and it has 80,000 users, so I think it's a good one.

But yeah, it's called Web Vitals.

Yes.

And it will show you that the Web Vital score.

One other thing I should mention is right now they're only using mobile scores as a ranking factor. In the future, they will add desktop as well. Okay.

Yeah, awesome.

So super helpful.

And then last piece that would be important to point out. Where do you find these? Like, where does this information live?

So there's a few places to find it. The one that we found is the most reliable right now is through PageSpeed Insights. When you run a Page Speed Insights test, you can just run any URL from your site through that. Also side note, if you look at the CLS score on that tool, it's pretty bad. I'm just saying there's a lot of Google saying, do as I say, not as I Do we're internally getting a little cranky about that.

Yeah. Anyway, Google is failing its own tests. Yeah, right.

All right. So anyway, sorry, too much coffee. So if you go to coffee because of the. It's nice and warm, go to Google PageSpeed Insights. Alexa just posted the link in there. Drop a URL from your site in and it's going to run a test and actually let me walk through the different blocks of that. The top it's going to be an overall score for right now. Please ignore that. People give way too much weight to that score. Then you're going to see a section called Field data. And below that will be Origin Summary. I'll talk about those two in a second. Then below that is the lab data. The lab data are six metrics that are from that simulated test that you literally just ran seconds ago. That's going to give you an LCP time, a first contentful paint time, a site index, total blocking time. There's a bunch of technical things in there. It'll also give you cumulative layout shift score. So those six scores are actually what's used to make the top score. The big score above that big score is literally just a calculation based on those six scores. So if one of those changes dramatically, that can cause your overall score to swing 10 or 20 points. So don't give too much credence to that overall. I would say just get rid of the overall score because it just confuses people. So that lab data is what you just ran on a simulated test on whatever server Google happened to use. So going back above, we've got field data and origin summary. So field data, both of those are pulling from the actual data from the Chrome user experience report. This is the information that's pulling from the same database that Google's going to use for rankings. Field data is for that specific URL that you just tested. If there's enough data for that one URL, it'll show that there's. If you have a really popular post that gets a lot of traffic, there might be data there. Then the origin summary is the average scores for all URLs on your site. If there's no field data, it'll just show the origin summary automatically. If there is field data, you can check a box and it'll show the origin summary.

Sure.

The Origin summary scores, those four that it gives you will be the same no matter what URL you test in there. That's showing the 28 days trailing information. And three of those four scores are the core web vitals and It'll say right above, Based on the 28 days of data, this passes or doesn't pass. The other place where, and this is also causing a lot of confusion, is if in Google Search Console you can find this information.

Right? Yeah.

And they've actually created a Page Experience Dashboard that they released a couple weeks ago in Search Console that it's supposed to be pulling from the exact same data, but we found it's often delayed or buggy. We've seen sites that pass in Search Console but fail horribly. When we look at the Origin summary data, or vice versa, and we're looking at the actual speed going, this doesn't make sense. I do want to mention in Search Console, they want you to validate fixes. They're giving you all this information. The information presented in Search Console and whether or not you validate your fixes has no bearing on your actual search results. It's just a tool to help you track that stuff.

Yeah, Right. So if you want your data in Search Console to reflect more accurately, you validate the fix. Validating the fix doesn't make your page show up higher because the page is the page. And then there's these tools like Google Search Console that are looking at it and analyzing it. But it's not Google Search Console that then is reporting back to Google and saying like, do or don't show this. Well, those are kind of separate, right? Things. Yeah, yeah.

And there, I mean, there are some tools in there that can help, like you can re index a page, you can trigger certain things in there. But in terms of this stuff, as a team, we've decided we're looking at the Origin summary. That's our source of truth. As far as we can tell, that's the best way to go right now.

Cool, that's great.

Thanks, Andrew, for your expertise sharing that with the Food Blogger Pro audience. For those who aren't familiar with Andrew, he's been on the podcast a few times. You see him around the Food Blogger Pro forums. And obviously when we do these live Q and A's, we'll see him as well and just has a wealth of knowledge around this because that's what he does day in and day out. If you are interested in connecting with Andrew and his team, you can check out nerdpress.net and if you're interested in joining in on these conversations that we have, whether on the Food Blogger Pro forum or in the live Q and A that we do each month, or just checking out any of the course content on demand that we have on Food Blogger Pro, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com membership that will give you some more information about what's involved. With a Food Blogger Pro membership, you can sign up for a monthly or yearly plan. And even if you just want to kind of kick the tires for a month and see what's going on, there's no contract or ongoing. You know, it's not like a cell phone plan where you can't cancel. You can come and go as you'd like. So we'd love to have you around, even if it's just for a month to check things out. A lot of folks stay quite a bit longer and become part of the community and kind of use it as part of their tool belt in growing their blog. So props to Andrew for all of his insight and knowledge and sharing. That, and thanks for following along on this podcast. If you haven't yet, make sure you subscribe on your podcast player of choice. And the reason that we exist is we want to help you get a tiny bit better every day. Forever. Hopefully that episode, this episode today with Andrew did that. Thanks for tuning in.