Por que você precisa se preocupar com os sinais vitais do seu site

Why You Need to Care About Your Website Vitals

Search engine results have the ability to make or break deals. When websites don't take the time to optimize their core vitals (at a minimum), they rank lower in search results, which can cost businesses customers and potential revenue.

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While the sites don't have heartbeats and lungs for a doctor to examine, they do in fact feature important vitals that many people check. This is a code blue error and puts websites on life support. Without stretching medical references too far, a company's website has the ability to make or break the organization when it comes to engagement, user experience, digital marketing, search engine optimization, marketing, and so on.

As technology advances with time and patience dwindles, website visitors demand more. Things have to work better, faster, more intuitively and solve problems without asking. However, this (somewhat understandable) lack of patience means that if a site isn't on the first page of search results, it's likely to never see any real use from people casually searching on Google. This is why search engine optimization is so important.

What is search engine optimization?

Search Engine Optimization, commonly known as SEO, is the process of improving a website to increase its visibility when people search for products and services using keywords on search engines like Google or Bing. This helps increase the likelihood that visitors will find your SEO-optimized website when searching for products, services, or keywords related to your business.

Google, the benevolent overlord of the digital world, and other search engines use bots to crawl a website's pages and gather an overview of the information. The bots then put this data into an index that works like a huge library where users simply type in the phrase they are looking for and it magically appears in the results. The search engine then ranks the results that match the user's input based on these indexes and how well the results match the query.

Many factors influence how search engines decide how to rank a list of websites. As bots crawl web pages to decide index ranking, they look for a variety of things, such as:

  • Keywords incorporated into pages and content in a natural way and without keyword stuffing
  • High-quality content updated regularly
  • Meta tags
  • Meta descriptions
  • Appropriate page titles
  • First entry delay
  • Page Load Time (aka Largest Contentful Paint)
  • Mobile speed
  • Cumulative layout change

While this may seem like a somewhat complicated list for mere search result rankings, without optimizing a website's vitals to please search engine bots, the website could possibly never see the light of an organic user's screen.

However, these factors are not just to help websites rank better. They also help users have a better experience and improve conversions to help businesses grow.

The main vital points of a website and how to improve them

Of the factors listed above, there are three main “main” aspects that make or break a website’s ranking in search results.

  1. Largest Contentful Paint – While it’s definitely a lot easier to just refer to this as “load time,” Google uses this as one of the key metrics in its index. As its name implies, Largest Contentful Paint measures the amount of time it takes for a website's largest content to load from the moment someone accesses the web page. Generally, if a website takes more than 5 seconds to load, users start to leave and find another resource. This is also important because it can be the first impression a potential customer has of a company. Slow loading speeds don't make good first impressions. There are many factors that influence a website's loading time, including plugins, hosting, unoptimized images, and so on. Google won't release a magic number for the ideal Largest Contentful Paint, but the general rule of thumb is 2.5 seconds or less.
  2. First Input Delay – It’s not uncommon to visit a website and click on something only to see that nothing happens. This requires another click to try and get the site working. Google pays attention to these types of minor mishaps and takes note of a measurement called First Input Delay. This measurement tracks the time it takes to actually complete an action on a website. A good example of this is the time between when a user clicks “add to cart” in an online store and how long it takes for it to appear on your website. cart. If they find the button isn't working, they're likely to click it multiple times, have duplicate items added to their carts by mistake, and ultimately decide the site doesn't work, abandoning the cart.
  3. Cumulative Layout Change – The visual sustainability of a website is the Cumulative Layout Change. In layman's terms, a website experiences a cumulative layout change when scrolling through a page and stopping on something, followed by a page change to keep up with where the scroll is. This is a very common problem and one of the most frustrating things for website visitors, especially when many people only access certain websites on their phones. When Google quantifies this in indexes, it measures the impact the change had on the user, as well as the shift distance. Typically, different parts of a page or even ads loaded at different times move everything around as the user scrolls down the page.

These three vital website aspects may seem like small problems to be resolved later during development, but they are actually very serious as they can end up costing businesses lower search engine results. In the “real world”, this equates to lost customers and revenue, as customers continue to click on competitor links.

If you liked this, be sure to check out our other articles on web development.

  • What is Redux and why is it important in Web development
  • What is Sustainable Web Design and why it matters
  • What is Web Design?
  • Why your business should use custom websites
  • Why You Need to Add a Support Bot to Your Website

Source: BairesDev

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