Core Web Vitals – It’s not always worth the effort

I’ve discussed Core Web Vitals a couple of times in my insights, and my advice has always been the same. Don’t focus too much on it unless your website is really slow and problematic for users. The reason being is that trying to achieve a good CWV score can be very difficult and very time consuming, especially when most gains will be very minimal.

I think what generally happens is that SEOs use CWV as a focus as it’s a measurable action, albeit one that ultimately may have no, or very little impact, on the performance of the website for users and in search. The reality is that for most small businesses it’s not an issue.

For a typical small, local business, in Search Console there generally isn’t enough data for Google to be able to report back the metrics for CWV for the website. This means that it can’t take these metrics into account for ranking purposes.

If you’ve got a website that’s enjoying #1 rankings for all of its target keywords then sure, spend some time trying to fine tune all of the CWV metrics, but otherwise, don’t lose too much sleep over it. It’s a sentiment that was recently shared by John Mueller from Google. There are much better things you could be spending your time on.

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