Google's Core Web Vitals and Jamstack: Boosting User Experience

This was originally posted on the WebriQ blog and can be viewed here.

News about Google's new Core Web Vitals must have already reached you by now. After all, it's quite a hot topic these days. Google themselves made the announcements that they are taking these metrics seriously and that they will now be part of the important factors to be considered when ranking websites on the search results.

Essentially, Core Web Vitals are metrics used by Google to judge a website's overall speed and user experience performance. The better the score, the better a site will perform on search results. Of course, other search engine optimization and online marketing factors should still be considered.

If you haven't heard about Core Web Vitals yet, no worries. Please see below for a more detailed explanation about it. You can also view this article for even more details and insight into this highly talked-about matter.

Before that though, what has this got to do with the Jamstack? The short answer is that Jamstack is one of the best technologies currently available to build a fast and secure website. By using Jamstack, you will be able to achieve an excellent user experience for your online visitors. This is a great thing when it comes to the Core Web Vitals since these are all about achieving a better-performing website.

What Are Google's Core Web Vitals?

The new Core Web Vitals metrics are classified into three important factors - Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

These measure the overall user experience of a website. Scores are given by Google and you can then determine if your site pages are Good, Needs Improvement, or Poor. Whichever page falls into the latter two assessments will, of course, need some overhauling and tweaking.

Large Contentful Paint or LCP focuses on the visible pixels on a page and the time it takes to load or render all elements on the screen. The idea here is that if a page or some of its parts take too long to load, then that will be considered bad web performance.

Users can be turned off by the slowness and may opt to just leave the website rather than waiting. To Google, this can equate to a demerit in the page's search result ranking. First Input Delay or FID, meanwhile, measures the time between the first interaction done by a user and the time the browser can respond to the first user input. Once again, this is another way to determine a website's page loading speed and ability to provide a top-quality user experience.

Cumulative Layout Shift or CLS is all about determining just how stable a site's page loading experience is. Any wonkiness is again another turn-off for users so the goal is to minimize those cumulative layout shifts and make the page loading process steady and stable.

These Core Web Vitals scores can be viewed by the website owner via Google's PageSpeed Insights and Search Console tools.

Overall, Google's Core Web Vitals are metrics or scores assigned to website pages meant to determine loading, interactivity, and visual stability factors. The quicker the loading speeds are and the more stable any cumulative layout shift is, the better a website's standing will be in the SEO perspective.

How Does This Relate to the Jamstack?

What is Jamstack?

The Jamstack is a website building or architecture technology that allows for the creation of websites that perform better in terms of speed, security, and search engine optimization. Anyone who wishes to optimize or build a new site should consider coding using Jamstack.

Developers can use a variety of tools and workflows that are designed to help create webpages that are easier to scale as well. Additionally, the Jamstack empowers developers to separate or "decouple" the front end part of the website from the back end or server-side. This is one of the main reasons why a website can load faster and improve the user experience while minimizing maintenance issues down the road.

With that said, sites built using Jamstack can also be called decoupled sites or static sites.

For more understanding on the Jamstack, we invite you to read our others articles on Jamstack:

• Why and How to Build a Corporate Website on the Jamstack
• JAMstack for Web Marketers: What You Should Know
• It’s Time to Drop WordPress and Migrate to the Jamstack
• What is a Static Website

The Jamstack is basically all about performance, high security, excellent user experience, and scalability.

In connection with the Core Web Vitals, let us focus on the performance part. The way Jamstack websites work is that there is no need for back-end infrastructure. No need to set up your own web server. Functions can be invoked quickly when necessary and since you do not need to manage a back-end infrastructure, you will save time, cost, and effort.

Content is served and loaded to users' view via a content delivery network or CDN. The front-end sections are coded mainly using JavaScript, which is already known for blazing fast loading speeds. The Jamstack technology can also help webpages lower the Time to Interactive and Time to First Byte impressions. This is done through various techniques, such as route-based chunking, code splitting, tree shaking, etc.

While this technical jargon may sound overwhelming to many business website owners and marketers, what they all mean is that you will get a fast-loading website. And since the new performance metrics introduced by Google through their Core Web Vitals announcements are all about improving page speeds and user experience, the Jamstack then becomes a really useful tool for easily getting high scores.

Why Switch to the Jamstack Now

The JAMstack technology offers so many benefits to websites, especially in the loading speed department.

Since these sites are decoupled, pages can be rendered faster and be made available to users quicker. Naturally, this positively affects overall search engine optimization processes. More importantly, building sites this way can help you achieve good results in terms of following Google’s Core Web Vitals guidelines.

Aside from faster page loading speed, JAMstack websites are also more secure and easier to manage. This can help website owners and marketers focus more on developing content and engaging with online visitors rather than be bogged down by technical difficulties.

For these reasons, we highly recommend that you experience all of the benefits brought on by having a JAMstack-built website.

Build Blazing Fast Websites with WebriQ

For professional and well-rounded assistance in building websites using the JAMstack technology, we here at WebriQ are eager to help.

We can assist you in building a website that will effectively deliver your branding message to your online audience. On top of that, we will handle the technical aspects of the website for you, which means that we will definitely build faster and more secure pages.

As for Google’s new Core Web Vitals metrics, we are constantly keeping abreast of these matters and will apply recent guidelines to your website right away. This ensures that all search engine optimization activities done on your website are current and effective.

Give us a message anytime and let’s get your business website up and running!