Depending on your organizational role, you may or may not have heard of a change from Google impacting the internet and therefore your business. This changed is called Google Core Web Values . It sounds innocuous enough, right?
This is one of a number of standards put forth by Google to make the internet a better virtual place to live. A benign place where only virtue, pleasantness and truth reside (que choir). Google attempted to address the virtue and truth parts with changes to their search engine algorithms. Such efforts birthed  such as "keyword stuffing" and "irrelevant keywords" .

Google made an effort to stop unscrupulous web admins from tricking its search engine algorithm into thinking  was something it was not in order to climb to the top of the Google search heap.


Of course, we acknowledge that this will be a never-ending battle. Cheaters will always try. But, what about that "pleasantness" factor, eh? Google actually wants you to enjoy using the internet. What?! Yes they do. You only THOUGHT you were enjoying the internet. But, unfortunately, you have not. No. You have suffered slow loading web pages, pages that display but make you wait more than half of a second before you can interact with them (oh! The humanity!). Or, imagine a web page loading then waiting an unbearable number of milliseconds before the page fonts, pictures and do-dads all finish loading and settle neatly into their appointed places on the page. My apologies for the flashbacks.

Google core values measures page load speed with the metric, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Waiting to interact is measured by First Input Delay (FID). And the metric for all of that page/font shiftiness delay is Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). All of this because Google cares about your web surfing enjoyment. More graphically intense web page designs and technical functionality of those pages makes such delays more common even though computers and the networks are much faster than they were previously.


While Google is not making as much noise about the subject as the rest of us seem to, it serves as a guide for building higher performance web design and architecture  . But it also does something else. If Google determines that your web site is not providing the best experience for your customer, your search engine ranking may be lowered if people search for services you offer on Google. (Oh, now you're listening, eh?) Even if your SEO is absolutely on point, this could be a factor.

All the more reason to make sure your web architecture is current and high performing. But, if you are wondering why Google, one "little" company gets to call this shot and are perhaps wondering what steps you may be able to take to meet the Core Web Values standard, grab the eBook on the subject . If you want to know where your website stacks up and how you compare to your competition online, just reach out. We would be glad to help out.