Core Web Vitals, Google’s pending search ranking signal, scores real-world site performance based on actual traffic. And developers have been taking Page Experience and Core Web Vitals seriously, working to understand how these metrics and framework choices impact the assessment score.
Putting empirical data behind some of the conjecture around Core Web Vitals’ metrics, recently published research at HTTP Archive specifically looked at two key metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), a user-centric indicator that measures perceived load speed by marking the point when a page’s main content has likely loaded; and
- Cumulative Layout Shift(CLS), which measures visual stability by quantifying how often users experience unexpected layout shifts.
The results, outlined by Google data scientist Sixing Chen at HTTP Archive, discovered that the AMP Framework stood alone avoiding a negative impact for both metrics in the JavaScript frameworks category. For LCP, AMP was the only framework to avoid posting a negative impact in the test. And frameworks exhibiting a negative impact included: AngularJS, Backbonejs, GSAP, Handlebars, MooTools, Mustache, Prototype, React, RequireJS and Vuejs. For CLS, AMP was only joined by GSAP and React exhibiting low impact, while the rest recorded a negative impact.
A published excerpt of this research by Google highlighted the foundational goal of the AMP Project has been to help developers create great, user-first experiences. Part of what ensures this mission is continuous monitoring of AMP-powered pages by an established working group, along with regular optimization updates to the evergreen AMP library.
Google’s editors went on to say: “We are excited to see that correlational studies … are further evidence that the AMP Project is doing its part to provide developers with one of the easiest paths to meeting the Core Web Vitals thresholds.”
Getting quantifiable data through research is a great source of validation that AMP’s mission remains intact and continues to showcase how the framework combines page speed and functionality to deliver a superior user experience. And it’s no surprise, as the AMP framework has built-in advantages, from prefetching and portability to a robust component library.