Sudden increase in "Needs improvement" for AMP Pages

[Channel Management]

Hi,

i need some advice on our Web-Vitals Issue.

We have seen a sudden occurrence of FID issues (0 -> 66.000 impacted sites) on June 2nd , which got those sites from "Good" to "Needs improvement" which in turn got nearly 98% of our sites from "Good" to "Needs improvement"

We have not made any changes before the occurence and it seems that only our AMP Pages are impacted which does not make any sense to me since the rendering happens on Google Servers.

We also saw an negative Impact on Search and Discover Traffic - which does not make much sense to me since the Web-Vitals should only today start influencing ranking.

If we check the lighthouse report for the impacted urls (Shown in the Search Console as "similar URLs") it seems we are far away from 75% of users having an FID above 100ms and more like 80% of users have an FID below 100ms.

Also, almost allways the lighthouse report warns about third party code blocking the main thread (which could explain FID) but allways points to v0.js, which is part of the AMP Framework.

I guess my questions are:

1. What could possibly impact FID on AMP sites if not changes made by us to the AMP template

2. Is every URL rated on it's own or do they get the same status assinged as those 66.000 URLs

3. Before the occurrence of FID Problem, about 50% of our URLs had a Bad CLS Score (because of Ads) - but this did not seem to have an impact on the "%-of good URLs" . Is this because Web-Vitals are measured against AMP pages (if available) and there the CLS is about 0? 

4. How on earth do we lower blocking time for the v0.js we don't even control?

Best regards

Felix

[Rick Viscomi]

Hi Felix,

I'm not qualified to talk much about Search-specific issues (try asking in the Search Central community) but I can try to point you to the right documentation and answer any general questions related to CrUX.

Responses inline:

On Thursday, June 17, 2021 at 8:30:59 AM UTC-4 swo.chann...@gmail.com wrote:

Hi,

i need some advice on our Web-Vitals Issue.

We have seen a sudden occurrence of FID issues (0 -> 66.000 impacted sites) on June 2nd , which got those sites from "Good" to "Needs improvement" which in turn got nearly 98% of our sites from "Good" to "Needs improvement"

We have not made any changes before the occurence and it seems that only our AMP Pages are impacted which does not make any sense to me since the rendering happens on Google Servers.

Maybe this Search Console documentation would help: My site status changed, but I didn't change anything.

 

We also saw an negative Impact on Search and Discover Traffic - which does not make much sense to me since the Web-Vitals should only today start influencing ranking.

If we check the lighthouse report for the impacted urls (Shown in the Search Console as "similar URLs") it seems we are far away from 75% of users having an FID above 100ms and more like 80% of users have an FID below 100ms.

With 66,000 URLs, the sample of 20 may not be capturing the full extent of the FID issue. Do any of their PageSpeed Insights results show FID with ratings worse than "good"?

 

Also, almost allways the lighthouse report warns about third party code blocking the main thread (which could explain FID) but allways points to v0.js, which is part of the AMP Framework.

If PageSpeed Insights is showing that real-user experiences from the field are having good FID, the lab-based responsiveness recommendations may not necessarily be relevant to the group-level issue. If you can find a page that does have poor FID experiences in the field, the results may contain more applicable debugging info.

 

I guess my questions are:

1. What could possibly impact FID on AMP sites if not changes made by us to the AMP template

2. Is every URL rated on it's own or do they get the same status assinged as those 66.000 URLs

Per the URL groups section in the doc, Search Console assesses URLs as a group, rather than individually:

"An issue is assigned to a group of URLs that provide a similar user experience. This is because it is assumed that performance issues in similar pages is probably due to the same underlying problem, such as a common slow-loading feature in the pages."