You already know how important Search engine optimization is for your website. But do you know web core vitals is also a significant ranking factor that Google considers while ranking your website?
To give you a clear idea about core web vitals and their significance, we’ve put together a complete guide that will help you understand:
- What exactly are Web Core Vitals?
- Why is Web Core Vitals important for your website?
- Tips to improve core vitals for your site
Read on to get some deep insights into the magic world of core web vitals.
Note: We’ll begin with explaining some technical web core vitals terms before jumping to their importance, but worry not. They are pretty easy to grasp.
What Does This Jargon “Web Core Vitals” Mean?
When customers enter a store or start dealing with a business, they notice how the staff treats them, the overall vibe, and how their problem is being solved. In short, they tend to identify how is their overall experience dealing with that business or a brand.
The same thing happens when visitors land on your website. They tend to notice how fast your web pages are loading, how your content is laid out(is it helping them navigate towards the solution they are looking for?), and whether the visuals are up to the mark.
So web core vitals are the key performance indicators that Google measures to identify your website’s overall user experience. It includes measuring:
- Loading time(Largest Contentful Paint (LCP))
- Page interactivity(First Input Delay (FID))
- Visual stability(Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS))
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
LCP is what measure the overall loading speed of your website. It measures the time from when a user clicks on your webpage link till the largest content block(video, image, or text) loads on that page.
A good loading time for a website should be below 3 seconds(2.5 or less). If your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, most visitors might bounce off your website.
First Input Delay (FID)
A website shouldn’t just look the part. It should also be convenient to interact with. So the First Input Delay measures how easy it is for visitors to interact with your website.
Following are the examples of interactions users can have on your website:
- Clicking a button on your website
- Choosing an option from a dropdown menu
- Opening the “accordion menu” on a smartphone
- Filling out a form(e.g., typing an email address for a newsletter subscription)
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
CLS measures how stable your web pages are while they load. Think of it in terms of the visual stability of your website.
However, if the visual elements on your website move around while it loads, you will end up having a high cumulative layout shift, which is not a good sign for your website.
So now, we understand what web core vitals are. But the next big question is still in the air, Why do web core vitals matter exactly?
Why Are Web Core Vitals Important for Your Website?
The content on your website might be good and compelling enough to get the eyeballs. But still, if your core vitals, including page speed, interactivity, and visual stability, is not up to the mark, you will find it hard to drive traffic to your website and generate sales.
Let’s take a look at some profound reasons why you should pay attention to your web core vitals.
Optimizing for Core Vitals Helps Your Web Pages Rank Better on Search engines
Who would want to open web pages that are unstable, slow while loading, and cluttered with crazy popups? No matter if the pages are ranking on top, if they offer a bad user experience, visitors will eventually get frustrated and find an alternative.
Now imagine what impact this might have on Google’s reputation and revenue. Therefore, to avoid this from happening, Google has updated its algorithm, and now web core vitals are included in it. It means that WCV now plays a role in ranking your site high on Google.
By optimizing for core vitals, you will increase your chances of grabbing that top spot on Google. A lot of your competitors might have the same quality content or perhaps even better that you have on your website.
But you have the opportunity to make your site stand out and increase visibility by leveraging web core vitals.
However, some might argue that web pages can still rank high regardless of paying attention to web core vitals, and it’s true. There are a lot of different SEO factors that Google takes into consideration before ranking a site and core vitals are just a part of those dozens of factors(backlinks, domain authority, etc.).
But even if your site ranks despite having a low web core vitals score, you might get a high number of visitors, but you will find it hard to convert those visitors into paying customers.
That is why you optimizing your site for core vitals becomes essential eventually.
Core Vitals Takes the User Experience of Your Website to a Whole New Level
Core web vitals indeed help you take your website’s user experience to the next level. By having fast-loading web pages, super interactive elements, and stable visuals on your website, you can satisfy your visitors to the core.
In turn, the users who have had a great experience on your website are more likely to come back to your site. Also, satisfied users are the ones who recommend your website in their circle. Imagine driving five extra visitors, each satisfied user. Wouldn’t that be great?
All this means more views and more revenue for your business. And it’s only possible by providing your visitor with the best experience possible on your website.
Enhance the Mobile Experience and Responsiveness
You might be surprised to know that more than 55% of traffic now comes through mobile devices. This depicts that the majority of the audience is on mobile. So websites designed for desktops only are of no good for mobile users.
Therefore, websites are made mobile responsive these days. But still, many websites score way less for the mobile view as compared to the desktop view when testing for web core vitals.
This is simply because of not paying heed to WCV. However, if you optimize for core vitals, along with an enhanced desktop experience, your website will become super easy to navigate for mobile and tablet users.
They will be able to skim through your content, click links & buttons easily, interact with visuals, and access on-page elements without any problem.
Help You Identify Weak Areas of Your Website
No website is perfect. There is always room for improvement and making changes so that you can stay on top of things.
By analyzing web core vitals, you can actually understand what you are doing wrong with your website that is hindering your sales or website growth.
One of the most famous tools for analyzing web core vitals is PageSpeed Insights by Google. All you need to do is enter your website’s URL on this tool, and it will diagnose all the performance issues with your website.
Based on that, it will give a score for each web core vitals metric we discussed earlier.
The diagnostic tab will let you know which performance tests your website passed and where it failed. For the failed tests, the tool will provide you with some suggestions to improve your website’s performance.
The great thing is that you can run the diagnostic for both mobile and desktop views and find out the weak areas.
Now that we know why web core vitals matter, it’s time to understand some tips and tricks to improve the web core vitals score for your website.
Tips to Improve Your Core Web Vitals
Focus on Image Optimization
It might sound cliche, but a picture truly speaks a thousand words. You can deliver your message to your audience much more efficiently with the use of engaging visual content like infographics.
Images can make a site look more attractive to users. We get that, but they can also make the site load more slowly. This decreased loading speed can be due to the increased size of image files and the number of images on a page.
So what should you do? Should you just remove visual content from your site to make it load faster? No! This is not an option because most of the engagement comes through images and videos.
Instead, you should decrease the file size, whether a video or an image, without lowering the quality. Now you might wonder how to do that. Well, for starters, you can use tools like ShortPixel to decrease your file size while maintaining the quality. You can also install their WordPress plugin.
Leverage Lazy Load
Usually, when you open a web page, most browsers tend to load all the content of that page at the same time. This means that the videos or any other visual content, even at the bottom of a web page, will be loaded simultaneously.
This might make your web pages load slower. However, you can use lazy load to overcome this issue. Lazy load only loads the content which is currently visible on the screen. The rest of the content gets loaded when the user scrolls down.
This technique helps elevate the user experience of your website as they don’t have to wait for the whole website to load before seeing the content.
Optimize Your CSS & JavaScript Code
We have talked about improving your site’s speed, but what if you also scored low for First Input Delay(Interactivity) while analyzing web core vitals?
Some Javascript and CSS code might be the culprit for a high delay. The scripts surely give your website a dynamic feel, such as moving elements like sliders on your website. However, on the other hand, Javascript takes its time to render.
But the good news is that you can optimize your CSS and Javascript code with the help of improvement suggestions by PageSpeed Insights.
Also, you can leverage minifying Javascript by getting rid of line breaks and comments from the script. This can be easily done using a WordPress plugin called WP Rocket.
Make Your Site’s Layout Stable
If you click a button on your site and it performs a different action(of a different button) than it was supposed to, it means that your website’s layout is not stable and the buttons are positioned incorrectly.
Such layout shifts can negatively impact the user experience for your website visitors. However, you can ask your developer to correctly specify your website’s image or video dimensions to overcome this issue.
This will help in preventing unnecessary movements of visual elements uploaded on your site.
Moreover, if you have ads on your website, make sure to find a perfect spot to display them. Most websites display them at the top for generating maximum revenue, but you may risk lowering your cumulative layout shift score as ads will push your content down.
You can place them in the middle or right after the top section of your site.
Are You Ready to Optimize your Website?
Whether you want to take your site’s user experience to the next level, keep it clean and organized, or increase your organic rankings, leveraging web core vitals is the best way forward.
Optimizing these core vitals can give your site a huge boost, not just in terms of SEO and providing visitors with a hassle-free experience but also in terms of engagement and sales.
So start analyzing your web core vitals and make sure to optimize them to improve your website’s performance.
But optimizing for core vitals can be a lot of work for your business, and we get it. That is why you can let us take the burden off your shoulders and have your site rejuvenated. We have a team of seasoned experts that can help your site be one of the top websites in your industry.
So why wait? Book a free 30-minute consultation call now, and let us give you the roadmap toward profitability.
