We Analyzed 208K Webpages. Here's What We Learned About Core Web Vitals and UX

6 Steps to Get AI to Recommend Your Brand

We analyzed 208,085 webpages to learn more about Core Web Vitals.

First, we established benchmarks for Cumulative Layout Shift, First Input Delay, and Largest Contentful Paint.

Then, we looked into the correlation between Core Web Vitals and user experience metrics (like bounce rate).

Thanks to data provided by WebCEO, we were able to uncover some interesting findings.

Let’s dive right into the data.

Summary of Our Key Findings:

  1. 53.77% of sites had a good Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score. 46.23% of sites had “poor” or “needs improvement” LCP ratings.
  2. 53.85% of websites in our data set had optimal First Input Delay (FID) ratings. Only 8.57% of sites had a “poor” FID score.
  3. 65.13% of analyzed sites boasted good optimal Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) scores.
  4. The average LCP of the sites we analyzed clocked in at 2,386 milliseconds.
  5. Average FID was 137.74 milliseconds.
  6. The mean CLS score was 0.14. This is slightly higher than the optimal score.
  7. The most common issues impacting LCP were high request counts and large transfer sizes.
  8. Large layout shifts were the #1 cause of poor CLS scores.
  9. The most common issue affecting FID was an inefficient cache policy.
  10. There was a weak correlation between Core Web Vital scores and UX metrics.
  11. We did find that FID did tend to slightly correlate with page views.

53.77% of Websites Had an Optimal Largest Contentful Paint Score

Our first goal was to see how each site performed based on the three factors that make up Google’s Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and First Input Delay.

Here’s how the sites that we analyzed fared:

As you can see, the majority of sites that we looked at had a “good” LCP rating. This was higher than expected, especially when taking into account other benchmarking efforts (like this one by iProspect).

It may be that the websites in our dataset are especially diligent about page performance.

53.85% of Websites We Analyzed Had Good First Input Delay Ratings

Next, we looked at Search Console reported First Input Delay (FID) ratings.

Here’s a breakdown of FID scores from our dataset:

Again, just over half of the sites we looked at had “good” FID ratings.

65.13% of Sites Had an Optimal Cumulative Layout Shift Score

Finally, we looked at the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) ratings from Search Console.

Here were the CLS ratings among the sites that we analyzed:

Average LCP Is 2,836 Milliseconds

Among the sites that we analyzed, the average LCP turned out to be 2,836 milliseconds (2.8 seconds).

Here were the most common issues that negatively impacted LCP performance:

Average FID Is 137.4 Milliseconds

Overall, the mean First Input Delay was 137.4 milliseconds:

Here are the most prevalent FID-related issues that we discovered:

Average CLS Is .14

The average CLS score is .14.

This metric specifically looks at how the content on a page “shifts”. Anything below .1 is rated as “good” in Search Console.

The most common issues affecting the projects’ CLS included:

Summary

I hope you found this analysis interesting and useful, especially with Google’s Page Experience update on the way.

Overall, it was interesting to see that most of the sites that we analyzed performed relatively well. And are largely ready for the Google update. And it was interesting to find that, while Core Web Vitals represent metrics for a positive UX on a website, we didn’t see any correlation with behavioral metrics.