The June 2024 Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) is out and it shows that websites in the real-world experienced an averaged across the board improvement in all Core Web Vitals (CWV) website performance scores. Some of the improvements are attributable to a change in how Interaction To Next Paint is measured, which will be good news to websites with dialog modals (popups).
CrUX Dataset
The CrUX dataset consists of actual Core Web Vitals performance scores as measured in Chrome browsers when visiting websites. The data comes from browsers that were voluntarily opted in to report website performance metrics. The CrUX dataset is publicly available and is used by PageSpeed Insights, third party tools.
CrUX Influences Page Experience Ranking Factor
The CrUX report is used for Google’s Page Experience Ranking Factor. The data is publicly available and can be used for evaluating performance, including competitor performance. CrUX is important because it is one of the only metrics that a website publishers can check that have something to do with a website ranking factor.
According to Google’s overview documentation:
“The data collected by CrUX is available publicly through a number of Google tools and third-party tools and is used by Google Search to inform the page experience ranking factor.”
While the influence of the Page Experience Ranking Factor may be on the lower side, it’s still important for reasons outside of algorithms like improving conversions and ad clicks.
June 2024 Dataset
The dataset for June 2024 has been published and it shows that Core Web Vitals (CWV) website performance scores have incrementally risen across the board by modest percentages. This shows that website performance continues to be a focus for websites. Most of the popular content management systems are doing their best to improve, with WordPress making positive improvements with each new version that’s released.
The following scores are for origins. Origins are the entire website, which is different from Pages.
These are the average origin scores:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
This is a measurement of how fast the main content of a page loads. It specifically measures the largest image or content block that’s visible in a browser (viewport).
63.4% (↑ 2.0%) had good LCP - Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Measures how long it takes for web page layout to become stable without elements jumping and shifting on the page.
77.8% (↑ 0.5%) had good CLS - Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
INP measures how long it takes for a web page to become responsive to user interactions
84.1% (↑ 1.1%) had good INP - Percentage Of Sites With Good CWV
This is the percentage of sites that had passing scores across all three Core Web Vitals metrics
51.0% (↑ 2.3%) had good LCP, CLS and INP
Changes To INP Measurements
Chrome made changes to how long it takes for a page to become interactive (Interaction to Next Paint – INP) is measured, making it more accurate. This may have helped to increase the scores of some sites that were inadvertently ranked lower for INP because the metric failed to account for some kinds of popups.
The Chrome team explained:
“The Chrome team has been continuing work on improving efficiencies in Chrome’s handling of the Core Web Vitals metrics and recently launched some changes to INP which may have contributed to the positive trend this month. The most notable change is to better handle use of the basic modal dialogs (alert, confirm, print). While technically these are synchronous and block the main thread—and so are not recommended if there are alternatives—they do present user feedback for an interaction. They were previously not counted as presentation feedback for INP, which could result in very high INP values for sites that did use these. From Chrome 127 the presentation of the modal will mark the end measurement time for INP and so should lead to improved INP times for those sites.”
Read the June 2024 CWV Announcement
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Ivan Dudka