Next.js — The Hybrid Architecture (SSG/SSR) for Web Developer Modernization and Scaling React

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FAQ

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the sum of all layout shifts that occur during the visible part of the page's loading phase. To minimize CLS, ensure images and ads include width and height dimensions and avoid inserting new content above existing content unless in response to a user interaction.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the perceived loading speed of a page, marking the point at which the largest content element is visible in the viewport. The ideal LCP threshold is less than 2.5 seconds for a good user experience.

First Input Delay (FID) measures the time from when a user first interacts with your site to the time when the browser is able to respond to that interaction. To optimize FID, ensure your site is responsive and minimizes JavaScript execution time. The target for a good FID is under 100 milliseconds.

Yes, improving Core Web Vitals can directly impact business metrics. Studies by Amazon and Walmart showed that even a 100-millisecond improvement in website performance could lead to a 1% increase in revenue, illustrating that better performance can result in better conversion rates and other critical business outcomes.

Google provides several tools to measure and improve Core Web Vitals, including Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, and Chrome DevTools. These tools help identify areas for improvement to optimize user experience and potentially enhance SEO.

Core Web Vitals are a set of specific factors that Google considers important in a webpage's overall user experience. They include metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Better performance in these metrics can lead to higher SEO rankings as they contribute to a better user experience.

Next.js is a React framework that provides features like automatic static optimization and image optimization out-of-the-box, which can significantly enhance web performance. Its support for static generation and server-side rendering also helps in achieving faster page loads and better SEO.

Lee Robinson
Lee Robinson
31 min
14 May, 2021

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Video Summary and Transcription
Today's Talk discussed the impact of Core Web Vitals on SEO and website performance. Strategies for improving Core Web Vitals include using Next.js, optimizing images and fonts, and measuring performance with tools like Google Lighthouse. The hybrid approach of Next.js allows for flexibility in rendering applications. Recent releases of Next.js have focused on performance improvements. Next.js Commerce offers an all-in-one starter kit for e-commerce. Vercel provides a tool for measuring real user experiences and identifying potential causes of performance issues.

1. Introduction to Core Web Vitals and SEO

Short description:

Today, we'll discuss how Core Web Vitals impact Google rankings in 2021. Core Web Vitals are essential for search engine optimization (SEO) and improving website performance. Better performance leads to better SEO and increased revenue. Let's dive in!

Hey everyone, thanks so much for joining me today. And I'm really excited to talk about how Core Web Vitals will impact Google rankings in 2021. My name's Lee, and I am a Solutions Architect at Vercel, and I lead DevRel for Next.js. If you haven't heard of Vercel, that's totally okay. Vercel is a platform for developers, and it empowers them to build great websites. If you haven't tried it out, I recommend going to deploy.new and deploying application in a matter of minutes.

But what we're going to talk about today is a little bit on these things called Core Web Vitals. We'll start with some background and introduction. I'll dive into these Core Web Vitals and how they'll impact your search engine optimization or SEO. I'll give some practical strategies for improving performance. And finally, after implementing those strategies, measuring that performance and seeing the changes that you've made. But before we can do any of that, let's step back and do some background introduction on why you should care about web performance.

So, back in 2009, so going back a little bit, Amazon found that for every 100 milliseconds of extra latency, they saw 1% fewer sales. So they were able to tie performance directly to a business impact on their sales. And just to reiterate this point, if we look a few years later, Walmart, when they saw, when they reduced latency by 100 milliseconds, it led to 1% in more revenue, and this was in 2012. So similar idea, similar results here. The bottom line is that better performance leads to better SEO, and it has a direct impact on your business.

2. Introduction to Core Web Vitals and Metrics

Short description:

The founder of Nomad List experienced a boost in SEO after improving performance. Core Web Vitals help measure user experience by focusing on loading speed, content display, and interactivity. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures loading speed, aiming for under 2.5 seconds. First Input Delay (FID) measures the time from user interaction to browser processing, aiming for under 100 milliseconds.

I love this screenshot from the founder of Nomad List saying, did Google search do any algorithm update? Because I woke up today and for some reason, you know, my, my SEO was off the charts. I was getting so many more clicks in Google Search Console, seeing the conversion rate from people coming from Google. So when you have better performance like they do on Nomad List, it's going to ultimately lead to better SEO, especially now with the introduction of Core Web Vitals.

So how can we measure this actual user experience of people using our site? Google has cared about performance for a long time, and they've given us many different tools to measure that performance. But when there's so many different tools, it can be hard to understand what are the most important things that I need to focus on, and what are the quantitative measures to understand what's good and what's bad? So really a breakthrough was made when the web performance working group worked with Google to introduce these Core Web Vitals metrics. We're going to talk about them here in a second, but really, they help you understand how good your actual user experience is by focusing on the end-user outcome, how they're actually perceiving your site. So how fast it gets in front of their eyes, if things jump around or not, how fast it reacts to input, and we're optimizing for the quality of the experience.

So Google and the web performance working group did this research, and they cited other research looking into HCI, human-computer interaction, to understand what are the most important metrics to look at, and that's core web vitals. First, we have Largest Contentful Paint. So this is the perceived loading speed of your page, basically the point in when the largest element comes in, typically something like an image or a video, so when you have a fast LCP, it helps reassure that your page is useful. It's getting paint on the screen or getting content on the screen quickly. And as I mentioned before, these core web vitals, not only do they tell us the what, but they give us some guidance on what is good, what is kind of eh, and then what is not very good. So we want to aim for an LCP of under 2.5 seconds ideally, and there's more information in the bottom right of these slides if you want to learn more and go more in depth.

So an example of this just to really show what this looks like is for Google search. Let's say I'm loading a page that's searching for Larry Page. You see I have my first Contentful paint, the first thing that I see on the screen, and then the largest Contentful paint comes in shortly after that. Plenty more examples of this on the web dev page as well. The next is the first input delay. This is measuring the amount of time from when a user first interacts with the page. So clicking on a link, clicking on a button or using some kind of custom JavaScript powered control so the time between when they actually click and when the browser begins processing those event handlers. And I think we've all seen a bad example of this. You click on an element and nothing happens when you click. You get frustrated and you click a bunch more times. It's just not great. We want to shoot for under 100 milliseconds ideally to have those interactive elements. To show this picture, tying this in with FCP, I know there's a lot going on here. So on the left, we navigate to a page essentially, and this is progressing from left to right chronologically. We navigate to a page, that navigation starts. We get some paint on the screen, and our browser is able to interpret that and understand that. And then you see in the middle, there's a point where the browser receives that first user input.

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