Core Web Vitals are a total game-changer for website performance and search engine ranking. For businesses, this is crucial since user experience can make or break your online presence.
It's no secret that online success relies heavily on ranking high in search engine result pages. That is why improving your website’s Core Web Vitals is essential in providing an exceptional user experience.
So, to help you achieve just that, we put together the things you need to know in this article.
What are Core Web Vitals?
These are a set of specific user-centred metrics that are used to evaluate the performance of a website in a Google Core Web Vitals test. These gauge a website’s loading time, quality of interaction, and visual stability.
Furthermore, Core Web Vitals are measured based on three (3) factors.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures loading performance.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability.
- First Input Delay(FID) measures interactivity.
So, why are Core Web Vitals important for search engine optimisation (SEO)?
Back in 2021, Google’s Core Web Vitals update made another big change in the search engine’s algorithm. The tech giant’s announcement underlined the importance of providing a good user experience by using Core Web Vitals test metrics as ranking signals.
In the case of businesses and marketers, Core Web Vitals SEO are an essential aspect of any digital marketing strategy.
Marketers can leverage the Core Web Vitals ranking factor in a lot of ways. These include improving website performance, prioritising the user experience, gaining a competitive advantage, increasing conversions, and building brand loyalty.
Moreover, developing and optimising a website based on the Core Web Vitals Google metrics, ensures it will perform quite well for search rankings, visibility, and overall business performance.
How to improve Core Web Vitals
Improving Core Web Vitals can significantly enhance the user experience of your website and help it rank higher in search engine results.
Identify slow pages
Identifying slow pages and assessing their Core Web Vitals is the first step to improving your website's user experience. Thankfully, there are several tools you can use for this purpose.
- Google's PageSpeed Insights reports on the 3 key metrics to get a clear picture of the website’s performance and pinpoint elements that need to be improved.
- Chrome User Experience Report provides real-world user data on website performance to help marketers understand how users interact with the website and identify issues that negatively impact their experience.
- Lighthouse is an open-source tool that audits website performance and suggests improvements by identifying specific issues.
In addition to these, there are other third-party tools like GTmetrix, WebPageTest, and Pingdom. Each of these tools provides a unique set of features and benefits, so it's worth exploring them to find the one that works best for you.
Set up monitoring
It is important to continuously monitor underperforming web pages that were identified. This enables you to easily check and detect any changes in the performance of the website.
When setting up monitoring, three (3) types of pages should be considered:
- Web pages that were identified to have poor performance based on Core Web Vitals Google metrics.
- High-traffic web pages.
- Equivalent competitor pages to use for comparison.
Conduct performance tests to identify problems
Here are the steps to conduct a Core Web Vitals performance test:
- Identify the web page you want to test. It is recommended to use a popular or important page to get a more accurate and relevant result.
- Use a tool to measure Core Web Vitals. Choose tools that suit your needs and access the tool from your web browser like the ones mentioned above.
- Run the test. The tools will analyse the page and provide you with a report on the Core Web Vitals' performance.
- Review and analyse the results. The report will typically show you a score for each metric and suggestions.
Thereafter, just use the data collected from the test to determine what changes you can make to improve your web page's performance.
Speed up a website with priority hints
Priority Hints will be a big help in improving Core Web Vitals, specifically for LCP. It is a new HTML feature released last year that provides marketers and businesses to mark important resources on their web pages.
Typically, all images on a web page are low priority or loaded last. This is because the browser cannot distinguish the difference between hero images to small icons.
A way to solve this is by adding fetchpriority=”high” attributes. As a result, the browser loads the image as soon as it is found. This, in turn, causes the LCP to occur much faster.
Eliminate render-blocking resources
Render-blocking resources have a significant impact on the render speed of a website. Most CSS and JavaScript files are a couple of examples of this. Basically, it means no content will show up on the site until all files are downloaded.
There are tools to report render-blocking resources and aid web owners in optimising their websites. For example, Chrome DevTools has a feature called the Performance Insights tab that indicates which elements are render-blockings.
Evaluate optimisations on the website
Lastly, once you have applied the changes and improvements to optimise your website, always check again after some time has passed. You can do it after thirty (30) days or more to see the results.
Moreover, if there is room for further improvement, it is encouraged that you conduct Core Web Vitals tests against and apply the necessary optimisations.
Continue monitoring Core Web Vitals down the line
With that said, it is crucial to keep an eye on your website’s Core Web Vitals. This ensures you are also providing the best user experience for your web visitors.
Tools like Google's PageSpeed Insights, GoogleSearch Console, Lighthouse, and Web Vitals Extension make it easy to monitor and improve your Core Web Vitals. Regularly testing and optimising your website's Core Web Vitals, can lead to higher user engagement, better search engine rankings, and ultimately more success for your website.
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