Core Web Vitals Readiness Report

By now you’re probably familiar with the Core Web Vitals update and probably a bit tired of hearing it every day. But as this update will be a “make or break” situation for your website, we want to reiterate a few things.

User experience (UX) is hard to measure, as it’s quite subjective for most people. Yet, there are a few things that annoy most of us - slow load times, poor interactivity, poor visual stability, intrusive interstitials, mobile unfriendliness, and unsafe browsing. Google has therefore managed to assign specific metrics and benchmarks for these consumer centric UX aspects - in this case load time, interactivity, visual stability - to improve how people experience the websites that rank on the Google search engine. For load time the LCP metric is used, for interactivity the FID, and for visual stability the CLS metric.

Google is gradually releasing the Core Web Vitals updates in batches. The first rollout already occurred on June 2nd 2021. At Conductor we conducted research prior to the first rollout, and we discovered that only 13% of websites were meeting all three Core Web Vitals benchmarks (LCP, CLS, FID) across key industries, showcasing that the level of readiness was low. The research included some of the biggest brands and websites in Retail, Tech, and Finance/Insurance, which are risking losing traffic, falling off rankings for main keywords, that could result in them missing important business goals.

Thankfully, the first update was a light one, and brands are still trying to identify the impact it had on rankings and traffic. However, there are more rollouts coming up in the next couple of months that could potentially have more visible outcomes. This poses a threat to unprepared websites with a risk of losing a significant amount of traffic and seeing their rankings drop. At the same time it’s also a great opportunity for brands to act proactively and build their competitive advantage by fulfilling these Core Web Vitals signals. When Core Web Vitals are met, users are 24% less likely to abandon page loads. From past Google Algorithm updates, we know that being unprepared has the potential to cause significant traffic loss. Additionally, you will be reducing the likelihood of page abandonment and bounce rates.

To be proactive and prepare for the upcoming rollouts, effective collaboration between teams is critical. Conductor enables collaboration between all your web-related teams. We have the reporting, workflow, and implementation tools to prepare your site.

• Conductor’s Chrome extension enables all your web-related stakeholders to quickly spot check pages with low mobile page speed. By opening the full report with one click, you can see if your content passes Google’s Core Web Vitals assessment.
• Conductor partners with the top tools to offer you access to industry-leading solutions all in one platform. No other platform has a partner ecosystem like Conductor. Conductor’s partnership with Lumar solves the challenge of assessing Core Web Vitals issues across your entire web property. Performance reports are available on-demand for Core Web Vitals.
• SEOs alone can’t prepare you for the Core Web Vitals update. You need implementation support from your web counterparts. Send tickets directly from Conductor to JIRA to get critical site improvements prioritized in the queue.
• As you make site enhancements to prepare for May, track your progress and impact over time with Conductor’s robust reporting suite.

Conductor is the only enterprise organic marketing solution to properly prepare and manage for the Core Web Vitals update at scale. Other tools don’t have the full breadth of functionality to ready your site.

Download the report to dive into our findings and learn how Conductor can help you prepare.