20 Experts On "How Google Core Web Vitals Impacted Their Website" And What It Mean For Your SEO In 2022?

Core Web Vitals became ranking factors for Google. It measures several aspects of web usability such as load time, interactivity, and the visual stability of content on the web pages as they load. Read what SEO experts say about core web vital update...

James Brown
Last Updated on October 13, 2023

SEO Experts

Ihor Kolesnikov

Shay Harel

Jes Scholz

Dan Brooks

Jeremy Rivera

Sean Si

John Morabito

Fili Wiese

Kaspar Szymanski

Kevin Taron

Alex Alexakis

Arnout Hellemans

Saijo George

Matt Jones

Rachel Anderson

Stephen Hockman

Jonas Sickler

Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR

Ihor Kolesnikov

Our experience with the Core Web Vitals update was not really inspiring. We at SE Ranking love analytics as it helps us deliver the best possible products to our customers.

Meanwhile, it turned out that Google is not such a big fan of analytics scripts. Over the past few months, we have been fixing all the things on our site that impact the Core Web Vitals score except for analytics scripts.

Nevertheless, by the time the rollout started, we were still far from the green area. As a result, we have experienced a drastic drop in rankings and traffic.

Moreover, I can say that most websites in our niche suffered similar update consequences. The way the update impacted our site gave us a push to speed things up with analytics scripts and make it to the green area as fast as possible.

Still, I can’t but notice that our LCP result is pretty decent and all the pages are loading fast enough.

Thus, all of the additional features we had to leave out and all of the data we won’t be getting isn’t really to provide the best possible website experience to our users, but to please Google.2

Shay Harel

Since there have been so many algorithm updates over the last few months, attributing changes in organic traffic to any one particular update is difficult.

However, I can venture a guess as to how our site performed after the update by looking at our site’s organic visibility.

From around the 15th of July, just after the update was rolled out, we noticed a nice boost in our organic rankings. This lasted around two weeks and peaked on June the 29th. Since then we have seen a slow decline in organic rankings. From my perspective, it looks like our visibility has stabilized to similar levels we were seeing before the update.

Based on the data it’s not clear whether the Page Experience update has significantly impacted our site or not.

Jes Scholz

Any decent development team can hit the Core Web Vital requirements and tick the box. The challenge for enterprise level sites is maintaining it.

So rather than tasking your team to hit the CVW metrics, take the approach of understanding the why behind the algorithm update and change your processes.

For example, JS scripts blocking the critical rendering path is a common issue across many websites.

Regular Core Web Vitals advice will tell you to minify JS, defer any script not needed for rendering above the fold and look into code splitting. Maybe this will allow you to hit that CWV targets, but it doesn't fix the root of the problem.

Over time, you get new developers who don't know JS should be minified, or sales gets access to Google Tag Manager and add a whole bunch of new scripts for clients or something will happen so you no longer hit the CWV thresholds.

And there is a chance it's not immediately noticed when the hype of the algorithm update wears off. So in the mid-term, you could be back at square one.

So rather than focussing on hitting the metrics, focus on the root cause.

In this case, the presence of JS script on the page. Some, like Google Analytics, have a clear reason to exist and should be optimised. Others, like a/b testing or survey tools, only need to be there when in active use.

Some, like ad scripts that are not a strong revenue driver, you may need to assess if the trickle of cash is worth the CWV cost. And the first time you do this activity, it's likely many will be legacy and no one knows what it's doing there in the first place, so can simply be removed.

Once the initial cleanup is in place, agree on processes for who can add a script and why. Add automated test so that code can not be deployed if they break from the accepted scripts or best practices, such as being minified.

Create an alert system if CWV drop below a specified threshold. Rinse and repeat a similar process analysis for all major issues. This is what will allow you to not only hit CVW targets, but more importantly, have a better website now and in the future.

Dan Brooks

There's been a real mixture of responses in all honesty – and after all the hype, I was expecting more obvious changes post-update.

However, for sites that have seen a slight decrease – we're working hard to ensure that meet the guidelines provided by Google – utilising the reports in Search Console and working closely with our developers to get things implemented quickly.

Most of the issues identified appear to be around LCP; so we're making sure that we audit large resources and images and optimising them appropriately.

For WordPress sites; I've been testing Nitropack.io – so far results appear to be very good so would recommend testing that on your sites.

Jeremy Rivera

When you're reviewing sites that are considered publishers, the importance of Core Web Vitals is increased, because the “black box” mechanisms at play for deciding which stories and articles get displayed through Google Discover are even less obvious than traditional Google Rankings.

This is especially true given the June and July updates for Page Experience, which removed the restriction from Google for their sources to be AMP only sites. Now the flood-gates are open, so it's worth re-evaluating your site's commitment to AMP.

With one project, they stuck with AMP pages, but reviewed the layout and calls to action for their AMP site and increased conversion rate by 2%, which represents a gain of potentially millions of dollars of revenue.

For another international version of that publication, they stepped away from AMP altogether, and have focused on improving CLS, FID and FCP scores by using https://waterfaller.dev/ as a task list for improvement.

Sean Si

After optimizing our website's core web vitals, our Page experience report in Google Search Console became green (good page experience) across the board and has 99.8% good URLs.

This led to an improvement in our site's Average Session Duration and Pages per Session numbers.

Although the optimization for core web vitals coincided with our site migration, after the migration has settled, our rankings for high-difficulty keywords which we used to rank on the 3rd or 4th rank suddenly increased to 1st/2nd rank.

I'm positive that aside from the migration, having an almost perfect page experience score really helped boost our rankings.

Some specifics we did to improve our core web vitals score:

Improved the page speed Applied the suggestions given by both Google Page Speed Insights and GTMetrix
Optimized all the content – especially the images
Optimized the codes used in the pages Lessened the
Outside sources being loaded in our pages

John Morabito

So far most of my clients have not seen any major changes though I have seen a couple instances where things improved around the time of the release.

With that said, there have also been a number of core updates since then so it’s really though to say.

Fili Wiese

To me Core Web Vitals and in particular the Cumulative Layout Shift metric which gauges the degree of stability of content by summing shift scores across layout shifts that don't occur within 500ms of user input represents an opportunity to demonstrate technical and SEO expertise.

It prompted the development and release of the Cumulative Layout Shift Debugger (CLS) https://webvitals.dev/cls/, an expert tool available free of charge and without registration to anyone who wants their websites to succeed in Google Search.

To answer your question, from a business perspective and as an SEO expert providing technical consulting services to commercial client websites, Core Web Vitals stands for a positive development and is something that I welcome.

Kaspar Szymanski

While I can not name specific websites or clients, due to confidentiality, I am at liberty to say that for major consumer websites operating in competitive niches CWV metrics are particularly relevant.

Currently we are well underway for many verticals to recover and regain organic search visibility after the drops experienced due to COVID-19 in previous months.

As mentioned in an article recently published on that very topic, recent past challenges represent a springboard opportunity, see: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-tactics-for-market-position/398623/ .

In short, websites committed to optimize the experience for their users stand a good chance not to merely recover but to expand on their market share.

In that sense performance factors, including Core Web Vitals are a critical online business success factor.

Kevin Taron

Currently, we do not register any direct impact from CWV to our search rankings. We have many sites with different CWV scores, mostly smaller client sites.

We do recommend every customer of ours to improve the CWV scores, but especially the smaller websites in a low competitive SEO space didn't move at all.

We have a few shops that benefits in rankings since the CWV update, but they were on an uptrend already, so we can't nail it down to the Core Web Vitals.

The content and the clear structure of the website is much more important than CWV.

When you do your homework with content and structure, then you can care about speed and CWV. A good user experience takes care of every aspect, but in our view it's all starts with the content.

Alex Alexakis

The recent emphasis that Google has placed on core web vitals has justified the prioritization we have always placed on basic usability and user experience for the sites that we build.

It is in everyone’s best interest to provide the best experience possible for a user that lands on a page to make sure the site will load quickly, behave predictably, and respond to user input instantly.

We have not seen major issues on the latest sites we have built or manage, but we spent the past year updating sites for new clients or sites we built in the past.

The majority of the changes have been increasing pagespeed, removing or updating plugins, updating WordPress and themes, optimizing images and scripts, setting up a CDN, as well as adjusting how pages load to avoid cumulative layout shift issues.

Arnout Hellemans

It did not impact my website because I have been focused on site performance for quite a while now.

onlinemarkethink.com Performance Report of GT Metrix

That's because site speed is not only important for SEO but equally so for users and conversions, nobody likes a slow / frustrating website experience. And there are plenty of nice (free) tools out there to get information on how to improve.

For me big wins are in optimizing images (right format (png / jpg / webp), responsive images, and making use of the (free) version of cloudflare a a CDN, some massive wins there.

Saijo George

It was a not a big change for my site tldrmarketing.com. CWV was something I didn't not heavily focus on.

I did make sure the site is reasonably performing well and there are still issues on there that I need to address ( will be fixing in v3 of the site).

I didn't see any noticeable drops (there was some small gains- but not something I can directly attribute to CWV fixes) with the launch of that algorithm.

Matt Jones

Whilst I haven't seen any huge, noticeable impacts on keyword rankings that I would attribute specifically to the Core Web Vitals update, I have noticed some positive impacts due to the announcement itself.

As Google announced that Core Web Vitals will become a ranking factor moving forward, not only on websites that I work across but across the industry as a whole, I have seen noticeable improvements to site speed and experience.

The number of core algorithm updates that were released between June and July was a lot higher than we would usually see, therefore making it difficult to differentiate exactly what updates may have affected rankings, positively or negatively, but the overall shift in websites improving their site speed and lowering the amount of CLS that takes place has made a great impact in my eyes.

As user experience plays a much more important role in the algorithms now than it used to, the work that websites carry out to improve their UX is having a positive impact on their organic performance by default.

Due to this, I believe that the collaboration between SEO and UX teams will strengthen moving forward and become vital in organic success.

Rachel Anderson

It is way too early to comment on this. The Page Experience update is still rolling out.

Additionally, the Page Experience update encompasses more than just Core Web Vitals, so fixating on Core Web Vitals alone doesn't tell a complete story.

For clients who depend on top stories for a large portion of traffic, I'd be researching what new, non-AMP competitors are showing up in top stories. Other than that, I think it's too early to make many calls.

Stephen Hockman

My website has not experienced any ranking fluctuations due to the Core Web Vitals update. The site was well-optimized for speed going into the update and so far it has not impacted me positively or negatively.

Jonas Sickler

Google blessed us with 3 other updates at the same time as Core Web Vitals was rolling out. A June Core update, July Core update, and a link spam update.

With 2 cores updates, a spam update, and page experience all rolling out around the same time, I don’t think anyone will be able to accurately predict which update impacted their website at the moment.

If site owners see significant growth during the last 3 weeks of August, I think that could be more attributable to CWV, as long as we don’t get another update – ha!

We’ve seen 3x traffic growth on our site from May to today, and it’s still continuing to grow every day, but I’d say these were more related to the other updates rolling out, and not so much to do with CWV because we’ve really been building out our content and on-page SEO efforts over the last year.

Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR

Core Web Vitals are endogenous, and a generalized term of page speed-related ranking factors. User-centric understanding for search engine optimization has gained better coverage thanks to the Google search engine's perspective for the SERP Quality.

Core Web Vitals and User Experience Algorithm Update's effect can be seen more for the competitive queries since the search engine has more options to choose among quality, and authoritative sources. But, when it comes to the niche, and specific sub-topical query networks, the User Experience Algorithm might not be the priority algorithm for the decision tree of the search engine.

In this context, Holisticseo.digital is not affected by the Page Experience Algorithm in a strong positive/negative effect. Because, relevance, comprehensiveness, and search intent coverage are still more important than page speed-related ranking signals and factors. Holisticseo.digital doesn't have too much content, or an external reference network, and optimized web page speed strategy. But still, the existing contents' overall quality and social-proof for this quality carries the website for better days.