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The article talks about Core Web Vitals in passing. That's the major change here. Two posts from May 2020 talk about them more - https://blog.chromium.org/2020

The article talks about Core Web Vitals in passing. That's the major change here. Two posts from May 2020 talk about them more - https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/introducing-web-vitals-essential-metrics.html https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/introducing-web-vitals-ess... introduces these metrics, what they mean and how to measure them. - https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating... talks about how the search engine experience will change > The change for non-AMP content to become eligible to appear in the mobile Top Stories feature in Search will also roll out in May 2021. Any page that meets the Google News content policies will be eligible and we will prioritize pages with great page experience, whether implemented using AMP or any other web technology, as we rank the results. > In addition to the timing updates described above, we plan to test a visual indicator that highlights pages in search results that have great page experience. Seems like a positive change. It will mean extra work as developers improve the performance of their sites. But having clear metrics to improve will make that work tractable. Also, advocating for that work to senior management will be easier when it's so clearly tied to SEO. The upshot is that ordinary users will experience a more performant web. Not overnight but over a few years, like the shift to HTTPS and supporting mobile web versions. Both of those changes were driven in part by the desire for better ranking on Google.

donohoe 5y ago
Yeah, but in reality most news sites will fail Core Web Vitals in their current state. Out of 71 tracked articles on news sites, only 3 or 4 score 85 or higher in overall Performance as tested by Google Lighthouse. Article Performance Leaderboard: https://webperf.xyz/ https://webperf.xyz/
- notatoad 5y ago
  good the amp detractors have always said that we don't need amp because authors can just make their websites faster instead. here's the chance to see whether or not that's true. news organizations have generally terrible performance and deserve to be punished for it in search rankings.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Most of the junk at the bottom of the list combines hostile web development practices with criminal negligence of good journalism. If nobody ever visits sfgate.com again, that will be a benefit to humanity.
  - topicseed 5y ago
    It is very true! Giants might move slower (as always) but most ad-powered websites have been working like headless chicken to get these metrics in the green. Granted, it's hard so some may be satisfied with orange metrics. But I've seen on all publisher-friendly communities I am in how much of an Earthquake the CWV Google Update has been, even if it is now pushed back. Let's hope more and more follow that trend because nobody hate a fast-loading site with good content!
    - nindalf 5y ago
      > even if it is now pushed back It was pushed back by 6 months, but it's live now.
      - topicseed 5y ago
        I meant to say Google using CWV as a ranking signal being pushed back, apologies.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - agogdog 5y ago
    They won't be punished because relevance is still vastly more important. A news startup isn't going to eat the New York Times' lunch by beating them with performance. Maybe you'll see a little competition at the top, but I'm skeptical... there's not much incentive to do so.
  - watwut 5y ago
    I personally hated amp, because then I got version of page without dark mode and with limited content instead of real one. I am actually fine waiting 200ms longer to get those.
- fenomas 5y ago
  How is that data compiled? Just poking around, the worst site in the list (SFGate) seems to have gotten a "1" for performance every time it's been tested, but when I try checking the same link in lighthouse (mobile mode) it scores 55~60.
  - topicseed 5y ago
    CWV metrics are gathered and aggregated from field data with the variety of devices and internet speeds you would expect in the wild.
    - fenomas 5y ago
      I was asking about the lighthouse results in the link in GP's post, is that what you're answering?
      - topicseed 5y ago
        Oh, my bad! Last time I checked, Lighthouse in Chromium used (by default) a Moto G4 on a mobile network simulation.
  - donohoe 5y ago
    Uses Google Lighthouse. Takes average of last 3 days worth of tests. Each site usually tested 1-2 times per day. All the data is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcIl3tAdLPLQ7ZkDMK2uR2HYfA/edit#gid=1647776330 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcI...
    - fenomas 5y ago
      That's the data I asked about. That data shows SFGate repeatedly getting a 1, but when I try the same test it gets 55-60?
      - p49k 5y ago
        There is no one lighthouse number. The site is likely using their own scores that are based on (but not direct averages of) lighthouse. Perhaps they give a score of 1 to the lowest site and scale up.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  But despite its name, AMP isn't much help to improve your website's speed though, for instance the new Reddit website uses APM and isn't faster[1] than the old one by lighthouse's metric (and I find it significantly slower from a user's perspective). Semi-unrelated trivia: Google lighthouse's own website is a disaster[3] by their own standards (with a score of 28), which I find pretty ironic. [1]: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fprogramming https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... [2]: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fold.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fprogramming https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... [3]: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.google.com%2Fweb%2Ftools%2Flighthouse%2F https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
  - SquareWheel 5y ago
    > for instance the new Reddit website uses APM and isn't faster than the old one by lighthouse's metric The AMP page will still load faster because it conforms to a spec which is known to be preload-safe. This means it can be served by services like search engines without any additional network activity, and with minimal layout calculations needed. Ultimately that's what AMP was designed for. It's more than just a head-to-head speed comparison. As a sidenote though, reddit's AMP implementation is horrendous for a dozen reasons. It's almost impossible to escape loading the real site, which is not at all within AMP's design guidelines.
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      > preload-safe. > served by services like search engines without any additional network activity You mean AMP pages egt preferntial treatment by Google, and all AMP-related Javascript (IIRC, almost 1 MB of it) is loaded the moment you search anything through Google. When you hit an AMP page, that JS is already preloaded and, true, there's "no additional network activity". I'd love for Google to serve my pages' Javascript as well when I search something, and get preferencial treatment, but alas.
      - 5y ago
- chrisacky 5y ago
  Is the suite that you use to manage these tests available on a git repo by chance? I really like how transparent you've made: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcIl3tAdLPLQ7ZkDMK2uR2HYfA/edit#gid=806206891 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcI... And I wanted to run something similar but for our own network of sites. (If so you can reach me on my email in profile). Have about 400 sites to access.
- partiallypro 5y ago
  Or just Google's own products/services. They usually fail. Same with Apple, Microsoft, everyone. I don't like the "Core Web Vital" metric because it is possible to make your site load slower or in a non-pleasing way for users and improve your score.
- mfontani 5y ago
  Would it be possible to add tech news sites to the list? I see you've the onion, but no engadget or ElReg.
katzgrau 5y ago
Some of the metrics they judge are things that AMP basically implements for you, and are a pain to implement otherwise. Cumulative Layout Shift is one of those things. Content blocks on the page need to have a fixed height, not one that is dynamic (which might happen with lazy-loaded content). For some use cases, conditionally loading content (one of those being ads) becomes difficult/impossible if you're using a third party system and can't render server side.
piva00 5y ago
I don't understand how this isn't a rehash of Google's PageSpeed push during early 2010s. I do remember having to do the same kind of procedure to get better SEO: measure against PageSpeed's metrics set and optimise the bad results. This looks just the next step after PageSpeed and I have no idea why Google didn't push this before the whole debacle with AMP, such stupidity but expected nowadays from the tech giants...
- jefftk 5y ago
  In the 2010s, PageSpeed Insights' metrics compared to your site to how it could be if it was delivered optimally. Did you compress your images? Have you combined your CSS files? Are your static resources longcached? A huge site perfectly delivered would score high, while a tiny site sloppily delivered would score low. They represented how much room for improvement your site had if you didn't want to make deep changes. Search was doing its own thing, and they didn't ever have any public speed metrics. Core Web Vitals is a different approach: pages are compared to thresholds. A huge site perfectly delivered now likely scores lower than a tiny site sloppily delivered. (PageSpeed Insights now reports CWV metrics.) These are the kind of metrics you can use for search ranking, because they are about user experience instead of developer room for improvement (low-hanging fruit). (I used to work on mod_pagespeed, which would automatically optimize sites, and I still work for Google. Speaking only for myself.)
  - michaelbuckbee 5y ago
    Thanks for the clarification here, but I wanted to confirm that when you're talking "huge site" and "tiny site" that this referring to the overall page load size and not the number of pages on the site?
    - jefftk 5y ago
      Yes, sorry, I should've said "page" instead of "site"
      - michaelbuckbee 5y ago

donohoe 5y ago

Yeah, but in reality most news sites will fail Core Web Vitals in their current state. Out of 71 tracked articles on news sites, only 3 or 4 score 85 or higher in overall Performance as tested by Google Lighthouse. Article Performance Leaderboard: https://webperf.xyz/ https://webperf.xyz/

notatoad 5y ago
good the amp detractors have always said that we don't need amp because authors can just make their websites faster instead. here's the chance to see whether or not that's true. news organizations have generally terrible performance and deserve to be punished for it in search rankings.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Most of the junk at the bottom of the list combines hostile web development practices with criminal negligence of good journalism. If nobody ever visits sfgate.com again, that will be a benefit to humanity.
- topicseed 5y ago
  It is very true! Giants might move slower (as always) but most ad-powered websites have been working like headless chicken to get these metrics in the green. Granted, it's hard so some may be satisfied with orange metrics. But I've seen on all publisher-friendly communities I am in how much of an Earthquake the CWV Google Update has been, even if it is now pushed back. Let's hope more and more follow that trend because nobody hate a fast-loading site with good content!
  - nindalf 5y ago
    > even if it is now pushed back It was pushed back by 6 months, but it's live now.
    - topicseed 5y ago
      I meant to say Google using CWV as a ranking signal being pushed back, apologies.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- agogdog 5y ago
  They won't be punished because relevance is still vastly more important. A news startup isn't going to eat the New York Times' lunch by beating them with performance. Maybe you'll see a little competition at the top, but I'm skeptical... there's not much incentive to do so.
- watwut 5y ago
  I personally hated amp, because then I got version of page without dark mode and with limited content instead of real one. I am actually fine waiting 200ms longer to get those.
fenomas 5y ago
How is that data compiled? Just poking around, the worst site in the list (SFGate) seems to have gotten a "1" for performance every time it's been tested, but when I try checking the same link in lighthouse (mobile mode) it scores 55~60.
- topicseed 5y ago
  CWV metrics are gathered and aggregated from field data with the variety of devices and internet speeds you would expect in the wild.
  - fenomas 5y ago
    I was asking about the lighthouse results in the link in GP's post, is that what you're answering?
    - topicseed 5y ago
      Oh, my bad! Last time I checked, Lighthouse in Chromium used (by default) a Moto G4 on a mobile network simulation.
- donohoe 5y ago
  Uses Google Lighthouse. Takes average of last 3 days worth of tests. Each site usually tested 1-2 times per day. All the data is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcIl3tAdLPLQ7ZkDMK2uR2HYfA/edit#gid=1647776330 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcI...
  - fenomas 5y ago
    That's the data I asked about. That data shows SFGate repeatedly getting a 1, but when I try the same test it gets 55-60?
    - p49k 5y ago
      There is no one lighthouse number. The site is likely using their own scores that are based on (but not direct averages of) lighthouse. Perhaps they give a score of 1 to the lowest site and scale up.
littlestymaar 5y ago
But despite its name, AMP isn't much help to improve your website's speed though, for instance the new Reddit website uses APM and isn't faster[1] than the old one by lighthouse's metric (and I find it significantly slower from a user's perspective). Semi-unrelated trivia: Google lighthouse's own website is a disaster[3] by their own standards (with a score of 28), which I find pretty ironic. [1]: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fprogramming https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... [2]: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fold.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fprogramming https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... [3]: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.google.com%2Fweb%2Ftools%2Flighthouse%2F https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
- SquareWheel 5y ago
  > for instance the new Reddit website uses APM and isn't faster than the old one by lighthouse's metric The AMP page will still load faster because it conforms to a spec which is known to be preload-safe. This means it can be served by services like search engines without any additional network activity, and with minimal layout calculations needed. Ultimately that's what AMP was designed for. It's more than just a head-to-head speed comparison. As a sidenote though, reddit's AMP implementation is horrendous for a dozen reasons. It's almost impossible to escape loading the real site, which is not at all within AMP's design guidelines.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > preload-safe. > served by services like search engines without any additional network activity You mean AMP pages egt preferntial treatment by Google, and all AMP-related Javascript (IIRC, almost 1 MB of it) is loaded the moment you search anything through Google. When you hit an AMP page, that JS is already preloaded and, true, there's "no additional network activity". I'd love for Google to serve my pages' Javascript as well when I search something, and get preferencial treatment, but alas.
    - 5y ago
chrisacky 5y ago
Is the suite that you use to manage these tests available on a git repo by chance? I really like how transparent you've made: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcIl3tAdLPLQ7ZkDMK2uR2HYfA/edit#gid=806206891 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sGKmbnW74u9r1GOzAQcI... And I wanted to run something similar but for our own network of sites. (If so you can reach me on my email in profile). Have about 400 sites to access.
partiallypro 5y ago
Or just Google's own products/services. They usually fail. Same with Apple, Microsoft, everyone. I don't like the "Core Web Vital" metric because it is possible to make your site load slower or in a non-pleasing way for users and improve your score.
mfontani 5y ago
Would it be possible to add tech news sites to the list? I see you've the onion, but no engadget or ElReg.

katzgrau 5y ago

Some of the metrics they judge are things that AMP basically implements for you, and are a pain to implement otherwise. Cumulative Layout Shift is one of those things. Content blocks on the page need to have a fixed height, not one that is dynamic (which might happen with lazy-loaded content). For some use cases, conditionally loading content (one of those being ads) becomes difficult/impossible if you're using a third party system and can't render server side.

piva00 5y ago

I don't understand how this isn't a rehash of Google's PageSpeed push during early 2010s. I do remember having to do the same kind of procedure to get better SEO: measure against PageSpeed's metrics set and optimise the bad results. This looks just the next step after PageSpeed and I have no idea why Google didn't push this before the whole debacle with AMP, such stupidity but expected nowadays from the tech giants...

jefftk 5y ago
In the 2010s, PageSpeed Insights' metrics compared to your site to how it could be if it was delivered optimally. Did you compress your images? Have you combined your CSS files? Are your static resources longcached? A huge site perfectly delivered would score high, while a tiny site sloppily delivered would score low. They represented how much room for improvement your site had if you didn't want to make deep changes. Search was doing its own thing, and they didn't ever have any public speed metrics. Core Web Vitals is a different approach: pages are compared to thresholds. A huge site perfectly delivered now likely scores lower than a tiny site sloppily delivered. (PageSpeed Insights now reports CWV metrics.) These are the kind of metrics you can use for search ranking, because they are about user experience instead of developer room for improvement (low-hanging fruit). (I used to work on mod_pagespeed, which would automatically optimize sites, and I still work for Google. Speaking only for myself.)
- michaelbuckbee 5y ago
  Thanks for the clarification here, but I wanted to confirm that when you're talking "huge site" and "tiny site" that this referring to the overall page load size and not the number of pages on the site?
  - jefftk 5y ago
    Yes, sorry, I should've said "page" instead of "site"
    - michaelbuckbee 5y ago