Core Web Vitals is an initiative to quantify the experience of websites to identify areas of improvement. Website user experience has been shown to have a direct impact on business outcomes. Delivering a better experience, where websites load and respond to users faster, often results in increased engagement and conversions.
On this page
Quick start
From December 2023, you'll begin to view a 'website speed' metric listed on the Shopping Experience Scorecard.
How it works
On the Shopping Experience Scorecard, 'website speed' refers to one of the three Core Web Vitals metrics, called Largest Contentful Paint. The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric measures loading speed, which refers to how much time (in seconds) it takes for the page to display. Learn more about Core Web Vitals metrics.
Below is a visual depiction of what LCP means for your domain.
The LCP element is the largest element when the page is loaded – highlighted in green in this example.
Depiction of a slow versus fast website
What exactly is a good LCP metric?
For a good page experience, a web page should aim to show this content within 2.5 seconds of the link being clicked. If this takes over 4 seconds, it's considered a poor experience.
Things to bear in mind
Know your audience
- Upgrade to a global CDN if your audience is around the world: If your website is hosted in one country but serves a global audience, then the further away users will likely experience slower speed. If this is true for you, using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that is suited to a global audience can help. If you're using a hosted platform such as Shopify, you can upgrade to a global CDN tier to resolve this issue.
Make your ads routing more efficient
- Minimise redirects: If you're running an ad or email campaigns, avoid using multiple link shorteners, or URLs that need to be redirected (for example, using example.com/blog in a campaign which needs to redirect to www.example.com/blog/, with the addition of www and a final slash).
- URL params: Often used for marketing campaigns, UTM params can reduce caching, and caching helps your page load faster by pre-loading frequently visited websites. You can update your caching infrastructure to avoid URL params.
Be mindful of rich content
- Optimise loading time: Reduce carousels made of several images that can affect the overall load time of a page as they can require several images to be downloaded at the same time if not implemented optimally.
- Optimise image resolution: Ensure that any media partners or design agencies supply web-optimised images rather than the full-sized print-quality images that they often provide. You can use a service like TinyJPG to quickly remove unnecessary data from images before uploading them.
- Videos: Avoid using them at the top of web pages and save them for further down the page, and try not to overuse them.
Next steps
For a full list and more details, you can visit our blog post and check your page speed insights, or if you're a Search Console user, visit your website insights here.