On the morning of October 28th, Bojan Basrak took to Twitter to ask something we might all have already known, but were still taking into consideration anyway as a matter of habit. He asked Google’s John Mueller if the search engine was still using the “old page speed signals” even after the Core Web Vitals update. And being true to his nature of keeping answers short if they can be, he responded “No, it’s all cvw now.”

Here are the Tweets:

No, it's all cwv now.

— ◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️ 🐀 (@JohnMu) October 28, 2022

What Does This Mean To Us?

As you’ll remember, the old page speed signals were introduced in 2010 and in 2018. The 2010 announcement by Google that site speed was a ranking factor was pretty understated, with Google claiming that it didn’t have much weight, that less than 1% of search queries were affected and it only affected users searching in English on Google.com.

The 2018 page speed sign announcement had people paying more attention to it, however, with Google saying that this algorithm update was designed to downgrade slow mobile pages in the SERP. This became a time when SEOs would be using tools like Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights and the Chrome User Experience Report to identify where improvements to mobile pagespeed could be made – and then making them!

Since 2018 there have been serious advancements in how we analyse and improve website pagespeed – not only on mobile but also on desktop versions of a site. Core Web Vitals field data became a way of seeing real issues that users were experiencing when visiting a website, giving SEOs and developers way more insight into what needs to change for the user experience to improve.

Gone are the days of a quick insert of a webpage into the PageSpeed Insights tool to see how it scores on desktop and mobile, getting a score of 90+ and then moving on.

Mr. Mueller said it himself – it’s all about Core Web Vitals now. And that means using field data to see real-world problems users are facing with browsing pages on a website.

Why do we care?

Keeping pagespeed low and the user experience quality high is going to remain an important part of how a mobile/desktop web page ranks. We might as well get used to it, and Google tells us which tools to use and which to ignore.

Focus on improving Core Web Vitals, and Core Web Vitals only, and pagespeed or user experience issues on Google will be a thing of the past. At least for now.