Pass status

[Karolina K]

Hi Team,

 I can see that it is possible to achieve "pass" status without getting all web vitals to green.

How is this possible? Is achieving green on certain web vitals more crucial than others?  

Thank You.

[Barry Pollard]

The web vitals are measured independently. There is a good threshold for each metric and a poor threshold. Different tools surface these differently, but typically green means good, red is poor, and anything in between is noted as needs improvement typically shown in amber.

For example, in addition to each individual metric, PageSpeed Insights (PSI) shows an overall Passed or Failed summary as a high level summary of the page. Passed means all three metrics are in the good range, and Failed means at least one is in the needs improvement or poor range. In that sense it is not possible to get a Passed mark if one of the Core Web Vitals is not "green"*. PSI also shows the upcoming INP Core Web Vital and some diagnostic metrics (FCP and TTFB) and these can be "not green" and still have an overall green Passed mark.

Google Search Console has a Page Experience report with a similar Good or Failing high-level summary to PSI, and a Core Web Vitals report that lists all three categories (Good, Needs Improvement, Poor) separately. Drilling into these then shows which metrics are not Good. GSC only shows the Core Web Vitals (including the upcoming INP metric) but not the other two diagnostic metrics (TTFB and FCP). Only the three current Core Web Vital metrics (LCP, CLS, and FID) are needed to get the green Good status*.

* There is one caveat here about the responsive metrics (FID, which is soon to be replaced with INP). And that is that not all pages have interactions. A simple blog for example may have many readers that open the page, read the post and then leave without clicking on any interaction elements. A page with no interactions will be marked as N/A and will still be able to meet the green pass metric in the above tools. This is the only way to "pass" Core Web Vitals despite not having green in the FID metric.

All three web vitals measure different aspects of user experience (loading speed, visual stability, and responsiveness) so I personally wouldn't say any of them are more crucial than the others—all are important to give a good user experience. The high-level summary that PSI and GSC show are meant exactly as that—a summary to let you know quickly if you have any issues you need to dig into further.

Saying that, if you have two metrics that are nearly good, and one that is very poor, then I would concentrate on that poor metric, even though all three are not good, as it indicates the worst aspect. On the other hand, some issues are easier to fix than others and maybe you can make a big improvement to one metric with a lot less effort, so that may make more sense to concentrate on. This is a balance each site owner will need to weigh up.

Barry

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