You can see more green scores in your core web vitals report in Search Console.
If you look at your core web vitals report in Google Search Console in the coming days, you may start to see more green scores. This may not be because of something you did to improve your site metrics. The reason may be that Google made a slight change to the metric boundaries it uses to define the red, yellow, and green scores in this report.
What Has Changed?
In Google, “Metrics defining the limits of LCP, FID, CLS that used to be <(less than) are now defined as <= (less than or equal).” Google has announced the size limits I’ve outlined below, but now we know that for Largest Contentful Paint , First Input Delay and Cumulative Layout Shift , these specific limits have changed from less than to less than or equal to the limit.
Core Web Vitals Limits
What is the effect?
“You may see a change in statuses,” Google said. Google said it would be “better” in its core web vitals report.
The Search Console report looks like this:
More information about LCP, FID, CLS: Here is more information on these specific metrics:
LCP (largest contentful paint): The time it takes for the largest content item to be visible in the viewport when the user requests the URL. The largest item is typically an image, video, or perhaps large scale-level text item. The element type is important because it indicates to the reader that the URL has actually been loaded.
Shown in the report Agg LCP (aggregated LCP) is the time it takes for 75% of visits to a URL in the group to reach LCP status.
FID (first input delay): The time from when a user first interacts with your page (clicking a link, clicking a button, etc.) until the browser responds to that interaction. This metric is taken from the interactive element that the user first clicked on. This is important on pages where the user has to do something, as the page becomes interactive.
Shown in the report Agg FID (aggregated FID) means that 75% of visits to a URL in this group have this value or more.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): It is the amount of change of the page layout during the loading phase. The score is graded between 0-1; zero means no replacement, and 1 means most changes. Changing page elements while the user is trying to interact is an important indicator as it means a bad user experience.
Shown in the report Agg CLS (aggregated CLS) is the lowest common CLS for 75% of visits to a URL in the group.
Why do we care?
Coming out in May with Google Page Experience Update we are preparing to ensure that our sites are completely green. We’re not sure how big of a ranking factor this will be, but even if it’s a minor ranking factor, making user experience changes on your site can make users happier and potentially increase site conversion rates and performance.