How often have you gone to the website of your favorite local restaurant, a utility website, or any other local business, only to find it stricken with stubborn slowness and issues with user interactions? Have you tapped on a menu link only for that link to move? Has this experience prevented you from browsing a menu or placing an order effectively?

Google has explicitly stated that its PageRank algorithms will favor websites with a positive user experience. Your web company must pay attention to these metrics and optimize for each. Relative to apartment shopping, this trouble can turn browsing your website into an annoying and frustrating encounter.

This article provides insight into each of the measurements that Google uses to keep track of these user experience problems.

A measurement for user experience

Google's Core Web Vitals is a subset of its Web Vitals initiative, intended to guide quality signals essential to delivering a great web user experience. These measurements involve both page performance as well as visual stability. The primary metrics are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• First Input Delay (FID)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Google has stated that Core Web Vitals has impacted and will continue to impact search PageRank significantly. Ensuring your multifamily websites are within acceptable Web Vital range is essential for your SEO.

Google recommends that websites aim for a 75th percentile "pass" with Web Vitals. Below this threshold, you can expect that your community website's search performance will suffer.

Largest Contentful Paint

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) represents how quickly the content of your web pages is loaded. Simply put, a low LCP score means a slow-loading web page. Optimizing the pages for this metric can be complex and multifaceted, and web developers must ensure that:

• Backend server resources are optimized to serve data quickly
• Served resources are appropriately compressed and optimized
• Javascript code is thoroughly optimized and non-blocking
• The web page, as a whole, is optimized for performance

Developers must work diligently to ensure a passing LCP score. Third-party resources such as lead-capturing tools are notorious for impacting website LCP scores. Be sure to work with a web developer willing to work with and assist third parties by giving them suggestions in optimizing their code for LCP performance.

First Input Delay

First Input Delay (FID) measures the time from when a user first interacts with the web page to when the browser responds. An example of a poor FID score (high delay) is a website that has you interacting with buttons or links, only for nothing to happen. Keeping this delay low is vital to keeping prospective residents engaged with your apartment website.

The most significant cause of FID is slow Javascript code. Third-party scripts such as lead capture tools and CRMs can cause considerable slowdowns on your website, so you should only enable them when it is essential to your business operations.

Cumulative Layout Shift

Have you ever attempted to click on a link or a button on a website only for another element to shift it out of your reach, down the page? Most of us have had this experience on the web. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is the metric that measures this annoyance. 

To avoid this issue, developers must ensure that space within the page's initial load allows for any dynamic content to load in that space. Careful consideration must be taken when adding any new feature to the website.

What these metrics mean for your multifamily website

Working with a web company that puts significant effort into optimizing for Core Web VItals is essential to getting the search performance and user experience for an effective marketing website. With this, search performance will improve, PageRank will stay high, and your marketing engine will prime to its full potential. 

Apartments 247 is Here to Help

Let 247 perform a free assessment of your current web presence. Our team will perform a complimentary Web Vitals health check on your existing website. If you'd like to get started, please contact us today!