Optimizing a website for a better user experience is a long-term success because Google going to use the page experience as an important ranking factor.
No matter you are a blogger, marketer, or developer Core Web Vitals can help you to deliver a great user experience on the web.
In this article we’ll cover everything you need to know about core web vitals, We’ll tell you what they are, how to test them, and how to improve your site’s scores to create a better user experience.
What Are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are the most important metrics that you should be tracking for your website. Core Web Vitals represent the foundation or core of what makes a successful website. Core Web Vitals are comprised of four major components:
- User Experience
- Website Speed
- Mobile Friendliness
- Security.
Core Web Vitals make up three aspects of the user experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
Image source: web.dev.
In short Core Web Vitals is a big part of the combination signals that Google use as “Page Experience” ranking factors those includes:
- Core Web Vitals itself
- Mobile Friendliness
- HTTPS
- Secure Browsing
- No Intrusive Interstitials
You can quickly see the metric of your site with Core Web Vitals reports in Google Search Console. The reports will show you if your pages are categorized as “poor URLs,” “URLs need improvement,” or “good URLs.”
The reports divide into two options “Mobile” and “Desktop”, all the reports data was collected from the Chrome User Experience (also know as CrUX).
Inside the reports, you’ll find more details about the particular issues, and the whole list of the affected pages.
Why are Core Web Vitals Important?
Google plans to use Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor and will be penalizing websites that do not meet their guidelines. Core Web Vital’s metrics are also important for ROI – they correlate with higher customer satisfaction rates which lead to increased conversion rates.
You should remember that there are approximately 200 ranking factors so page experience is one of those factors.
In fact, by the announcement and the core web vitals its self. We could expect that it will make up the biggest chunk of your page experience score.
It important to point your site with a great score of page experience, but keep in mind that core web vitals alone won’t magically push your content to #1 spot of Google.
In fact, it one of the most important factors among others (200 ranking factors) that Google use to rank a site in the search.
However, it really matters between multiple contents, when it comes to rank a content position in a search.
Now you have know what are the core web vitals is, and how it important for your site ranking which leading us to steps…
How to Improve Core Web Vitals?
As we had mentioned above that we are going to cover everything about core web vitals such as how to improve them, now you come across the place.
It’s the time for you to learn how to start improve core web vitals score to getting great user experience for the user and search engine.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
The largest contentful paint is the metric that measures the time it takes for a webpage to paint content on a user’s screen from the first time it loads.
LCP measurement is different than other page speed metric like time to first byte (TTFB) Because it only measure the paint of full content by user viewport, the remain content are not measured.
What is LCP good score? The best practice of optimizing your webpage for better score of LCP it should have to load 2.50 second or less than that and the over of that should be a need to improve or a poor optimized, see the image below.
To measure the LCP of your page you need to use tool that helps you improve the score and details things impact your page loading and show what make your site slow. You can use Google PageSpeed Insight to measure you LCP and others web vitals metric.
After you do the test and see the times show higher than two second that your LCP is a Poor optimized and need to be fix, It can be cause many reason that make it slow and I will show you how to improve.
How to Improve LCP?
So here are the commons issues that will impact your LCP score that Google PageSpeed Insight (PSI) recommendation addressed and how you can take action to fix it.
PSI RECOMMENDATION ADDRESSED | HOW TO IMPROVE? |
| Improve the Time to First Byte |
| Defer JavaScript |
| Optimize Your Images |
| Compress Text Files |
| Use a CDN |
| Remove Unused JavaScript |
| Remove Unused CSS |
| Defer Non-Critical CSS and Inline Critical CSS |
| Minify CSS and JS Files |
| Use Preload for Critical Assets |
| Establish Third-party Connections Early |
The best practice of optimize your website for a fast LCP and better user experience of this factors you should following these:
-
Use Lightweight Theme - you should use the super fast theme like Astra or GeneratePress these themes are build with a speed optimized theme, which makes your site load faster.
-
Use a Fast Hosting - a hosting also impact your website speed if your want your site to load super fast you need to consider with premium hosting like Flywheel or Kinsta these hosting company are a super fast hosting for your WordPress site.
-
Use a CDN - using CDN can help you improve your site performance but if you are using one of above hosting company they already included a CDN hosting feature in your hosting package.
-
Use a Premium Caching Plugin- a caching plugin is built to improve a website performance but there are limitation functions in free version of cache plugin but if you want a super loading site you have to consider with a premium version that has the features.
First Input Delay (FID)
First Input Delay is the second factors of core web vitals that use to measure the time of the user first interact on site (i.e: click on the link, or tap on a button) to the time that browser actually begin the processing or response to those interactions.
What is a good score of FID? the best practice of a good score of FID is the to response the interaction 100 milliseconds or less than that, or 300 milliseconds is need to improvement and about that is a poor optimized and need to take action of fixing it.
How to improve FID?
First you need to take looks and see what Google PageSpeed Insight recommend to improve, but here I will bring the commons issues that make your FID get poor score.
PSI RECOMMENDATION ADDRESSED | HOW TO IMPROVE? |
| Delay the JS Execution Time Until User Interaction. |
| Defer JavaScript |
| Compress Text Files |
| Remove Unused JavaScript |
| Remove unused CSS |
| Defer Non-Critical CSS and Inline Critical CSS |
| Minify JS Files |
The best practice of optimize the FID for a better score and a good user experience to use cache plugin like WP-Rock this plugin will do the thing for you on improving your core web vitals score.
