Google Core Web Vitals are website performance metrics that Google considers important for overall user experience. These web vital scores are part of Google’s overall page experience score, which will impact your SEO rankings.
These metrics are useful because, even if your WordPress website loads fast, it may not be fully functional for users. Even if a page has loaded, a visitor might not be able to do what they want or access the information they need.
Core Web Vitals are designed to help with this. They let you measure how quickly your website loads, becomes visible, and is ready for your visitors to use.
To do that, Google uses three quality tests:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
First Input Delay (FID)
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
You can learn more about these tests in our ultimate guide on how to optimize Core Web Vitals for WordPress.
However, Google is replacing FID with a new test called INP (Interaction to Next Paint).
This change currently has the status of ‘Pending’ and will be finalized in March 2024. This gives you time to prepare so that your SEO rankings are not impacted, and we will show you how later in this article.