Google Announces Web Vitals to Provide a More Unified Guidance for Quality Signals

Web Vitals, an initiative by Google that aims to provide a more unified guidance for quality signals that Google believes are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web. They say that the Core Web Vitals are these 3 familiar signals we all would have seen in Lighthouse audits

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures perceived load speed and marks the point in the page load timeline when the page’s main content has likely loaded. They recommend LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
• First Input Delay (FID) measures responsiveness and quantifies the experience users feel when trying to first interact with the page. They recommend pages should have a FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability and quantifies the amount of unexpected layout shift of visible page content. They recommend pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.

They also have an alpha version of a Chrome extension that you can sideload on chrome (it’s not yet available on the Chrome Extention store) and a web-vitals JS library. Their existing tools like Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, etc will be updated in the coming months to provide consistent and actionable guidance for improving  Core Web Vitals.

Here are the instructions to install the plugin

1. Download this repo as a ZIP file from GitHub.
2. Unzip the file and you should have a folder named web-vitals-extension-master.
3. In Chrome go to the extensions page (chrome://extensions).
4. Enable Developer Mode.
5. Drag the web-vitals-extension-master folder anywhere on the page to import it (do not delete the folder afterwards).

They also are working on a new REST API that will make accessing both URL and origin level data from Chrome UX Report (CrUX) simple and easy.