5 ms·

I've been working on core web vitals for the better part of a year at a major news outlet. I have seriously mixed feelings. There's probably an hour-long talk a

I've been working on core web vitals for the better part of a year at a major news outlet. I have seriously mixed feelings. There's probably an hour-long talk about this in me but briefly: - It's really nice and maybe unprecedented to have an alignment of business, user, eng, and seo goals. Google is using it's monopoly to change roadmap priorities across the industry. The web vitals themselves are unquestionably good for the user. - Google's guidance on how the scores work and when changes will be incorporated into rankings / carousel eligibility has been overall poor. The info is out there but changes constantly and comes from myriad sources. - Similarly, the way these scores are measured are a bit of a secret sauce. It's impossible really to model user behavior / devices in a way that ensures you will hit your performance targets. Google provides a lot of tooling/instrumentation, but the measurements sometimes conflict with one another. I could go on. I'm the mst senior FE guy at this company and it's really consumed most of my work hours since last June, but that's kinda par for the course in publishing. Google swings it's weight around and publishers react.

dang 5y ago
If you want to write something about your experience with this, I'm sure the community here would appreciate a fact-based third-party article. If you wrote it in the same style as your comment here, we would put such an article in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it would get a random placement on HN's front page. Email me at hn@ycombinator.com if you'd like some tips about that.
- djtriptych 5y ago
  Thanks! I'll run it by stakeholders internally and see if I can de-anonymize :)
eli 5y ago
Getting wildly different numbers from different tools is super annoying but I'm pretty sure the data they'll actually use in rankings is crowdsourced from Chrome users: https://web.dev/chrome-ux-report/ https://web.dev/chrome-ux-report/ Which of course you can only see weeks in retrospect.
- djtriptych 5y ago
  Yeah not only is there a 28 day lag time, but _new_ content on your site is grouped with "similar" URLs, using some secret Google special sauce to determine other pages on your site to use as a baseline. This has been one of the most frustrating parts. Or to take it further, it's still nearly impossible to use google's tools and determine that a particular DIV or Ad is causing damaging shift _in aggregate_. Worse, it's impossible (and probably will always be) to tell the dollar value of getting all the web vitals to "green". They are pretty agressive targets for most publishers I think, but it's unclear exactly how much these fixes are worth (in additional traffic, seo performance, carousel inclusion, etc). This is a bit "the nature of the beast" when dealing with Google rankings, their most valuable corporate secret, but still, this is a big, hard, expensive job, with relatively clear inputs and measurement, but with totally opaque outputs / ROI.
WillPostForFood 5y ago
* The web vitals themselves are unquestionably good for the user* Fast pages are good, but Google is using their tools like Page Speed to push you to adopt Google’s ideas of fast, like using WebP for images. So now you might have a bunch of cruft in your page to support multiple image types. Also, as user, I hate lazy loading. I can scroll faster than images load. I’d rather everything load in the beginning, and have images there as I scroll.
- onli 5y ago
  You can not scroll faster than images load. You can maybe jump via the scrollbar faster to a page position than images load, but that's it. That's at least with the HTML5 async image standard in Firefox. It's up to the browser after all, so if yours loads images too slow the issue might be there. And sure, if the images are huge they will take a long time to load, but that's also covered by the core web vitals. A site I built a while ago is a good test case for that imho, https://www.sustaphones.com/ https://www.sustaphones.com/. Long list, many small images, loaded from a CDN. I can maybe provoke a flicker with the scrollbar, but not with regular scrolling. Edit: That's for broadband. With a 56K modem or something that's of course a different story. But loading a bunch of images in advance on the modern web is also not a good option then.
  - kuschku 5y ago
    On slower networks, it's common to load a page, do something else until the page is 100% done, and then expect to be able to view the whole page without any further loading.
    - onli 5y ago
      I'm aware :) My HP Veer had a funny "feature" where after some inactivity it would reload the page when you then scrolled it. It depends though on the content page and on how slow the network is exactly, doesn't it? I often enough preferred to have the text already and decide based on that whether to wait for the images. Async with non-jumping base content (which the core web vitals also cover) is great for that. And with it being a browser feature, even if Google pushes for it the user can always deactivate it. On real browsers at least.
Fuzzeh 5y ago
Core web vitals is a joke. Literally 4 days ago it started bitching to me about breadcrumbs telling me that data-vocabulary.org schema deprecated Google ; New Breadcrumbs issue detected for site xxxxx 24 Jun 2021•Breadcrumbs So I look into it, knowing I'd fixed that ages ago.... Google ; Last crawled : 13 Nov 2019 Triggering stuff because you eventually got round to looking at it 19 months later? and it's all like that full of massive holes that make zero sense. Google; "This product doesn't show how many reviews it has"... Me; "It has no reviews" Google; "ERROR! ERROR! ERROR! ERROR! zero is not a valid number!!!!" Me; "Fuck you Google" Google; "This product doesn't show how many reviews it has"... I'm not even going to get into how shitty pagespeed insights is* - it's not even close to lighthouse. It tells you to increase your caching but doesn't use caching in performance measurements. I presume google has a giant ass that it pulls most of the figures out of on each run. I live in an area of the UK with one of the worst mobile phone signals known to man, pages load in < 2 seconds google consistently claims at least double. I really don't enjoy spending hours of my days having to check that Google haven't moved the goalposts yet again. * I lied, I am.
- bcrl 5y ago
  I tried to report a bug to Intuit about QuickBooks online the other day. 45 minutes later, the person answering the phone at the other end was finally able to give me a ticket number. I don't understand why it has become so hard to give feedback to developers to improve their product. I like it when people report bugs that give me a better understanding of how my software is being used -- am I really in the minority here?
  - tmikaeld 5y ago
    Depends on the bug, if it hurts the business it's generally fixed instantly, if it's just an annoyance, feet are dragged.
  - lazyasciiart 5y ago
    No, it's just that bugs of the type you describe are the minority of those that people want to report.

dang 5y ago

If you want to write something about your experience with this, I'm sure the community here would appreciate a fact-based third-party article. If you wrote it in the same style as your comment here, we would put such an article in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it would get a random placement on HN's front page. Email me at hn@ycombinator.com if you'd like some tips about that.

djtriptych 5y ago
Thanks! I'll run it by stakeholders internally and see if I can de-anonymize :)

eli 5y ago

Getting wildly different numbers from different tools is super annoying but I'm pretty sure the data they'll actually use in rankings is crowdsourced from Chrome users: https://web.dev/chrome-ux-report/ https://web.dev/chrome-ux-report/ Which of course you can only see weeks in retrospect.

djtriptych 5y ago
Yeah not only is there a 28 day lag time, but _new_ content on your site is grouped with "similar" URLs, using some secret Google special sauce to determine other pages on your site to use as a baseline. This has been one of the most frustrating parts. Or to take it further, it's still nearly impossible to use google's tools and determine that a particular DIV or Ad is causing damaging shift _in aggregate_. Worse, it's impossible (and probably will always be) to tell the dollar value of getting all the web vitals to "green". They are pretty agressive targets for most publishers I think, but it's unclear exactly how much these fixes are worth (in additional traffic, seo performance, carousel inclusion, etc). This is a bit "the nature of the beast" when dealing with Google rankings, their most valuable corporate secret, but still, this is a big, hard, expensive job, with relatively clear inputs and measurement, but with totally opaque outputs / ROI.

WillPostForFood 5y ago

* The web vitals themselves are unquestionably good for the user* Fast pages are good, but Google is using their tools like Page Speed to push you to adopt Google’s ideas of fast, like using WebP for images. So now you might have a bunch of cruft in your page to support multiple image types. Also, as user, I hate lazy loading. I can scroll faster than images load. I’d rather everything load in the beginning, and have images there as I scroll.

onli 5y ago
You can not scroll faster than images load. You can maybe jump via the scrollbar faster to a page position than images load, but that's it. That's at least with the HTML5 async image standard in Firefox. It's up to the browser after all, so if yours loads images too slow the issue might be there. And sure, if the images are huge they will take a long time to load, but that's also covered by the core web vitals. A site I built a while ago is a good test case for that imho, https://www.sustaphones.com/ https://www.sustaphones.com/. Long list, many small images, loaded from a CDN. I can maybe provoke a flicker with the scrollbar, but not with regular scrolling. Edit: That's for broadband. With a 56K modem or something that's of course a different story. But loading a bunch of images in advance on the modern web is also not a good option then.
- kuschku 5y ago
  On slower networks, it's common to load a page, do something else until the page is 100% done, and then expect to be able to view the whole page without any further loading.
  - onli 5y ago
    I'm aware :) My HP Veer had a funny "feature" where after some inactivity it would reload the page when you then scrolled it. It depends though on the content page and on how slow the network is exactly, doesn't it? I often enough preferred to have the text already and decide based on that whether to wait for the images. Async with non-jumping base content (which the core web vitals also cover) is great for that. And with it being a browser feature, even if Google pushes for it the user can always deactivate it. On real browsers at least.

Fuzzeh 5y ago

Core web vitals is a joke. Literally 4 days ago it started bitching to me about breadcrumbs telling me that data-vocabulary.org schema deprecated Google ; New Breadcrumbs issue detected for site xxxxx 24 Jun 2021•Breadcrumbs So I look into it, knowing I'd fixed that ages ago.... Google ; Last crawled : 13 Nov 2019 Triggering stuff because you eventually got round to looking at it 19 months later? and it's all like that full of massive holes that make zero sense. Google; "This product doesn't show how many reviews it has"... Me; "It has no reviews" Google; "ERROR! ERROR! ERROR! ERROR! zero is not a valid number!!!!" Me; "Fuck you Google" Google; "This product doesn't show how many reviews it has"... I'm not even going to get into how shitty pagespeed insights is* - it's not even close to lighthouse. It tells you to increase your caching but doesn't use caching in performance measurements. I presume google has a giant ass that it pulls most of the figures out of on each run. I live in an area of the UK with one of the worst mobile phone signals known to man, pages load in < 2 seconds google consistently claims at least double. I really don't enjoy spending hours of my days having to check that Google haven't moved the goalposts yet again. * I lied, I am.

bcrl 5y ago
I tried to report a bug to Intuit about QuickBooks online the other day. 45 minutes later, the person answering the phone at the other end was finally able to give me a ticket number. I don't understand why it has become so hard to give feedback to developers to improve their product. I like it when people report bugs that give me a better understanding of how my software is being used -- am I really in the minority here?
- tmikaeld 5y ago
  Depends on the bug, if it hurts the business it's generally fixed instantly, if it's just an annoyance, feet are dragged.
- lazyasciiart 5y ago
  No, it's just that bugs of the type you describe are the minority of those that people want to report.