Why Core Web Vitals Are Important?

First, What Are Core Web Vital?

 

Core Web Vitals are a group of particular elements that Google believes are crucial to the overall user experience of a webpage. The three distinct page speed and user interaction statistics that make up Core Web Vitals are largest contentful paint, first input delay, and cumulative layout shift.

In other words, Core Web Vitals identify user experience issues by generating a metric for three primary areas of user experience, including:

• Page loading performance
• HTTPS
• Ease of interaction
• Visual stability of a page from a user’s perspective

Improving these metrics can help improve the user experience of a website and make it more likely that users will stay on the site and engage with its content. This can lead to higher search rankings and more traffic to the site.

Those 4 factors will help the developers troubleshoot efficiently, even though they don’t show all the user experience issues.

You can find it under Experience in Google Search Console:

You can check your LCP, FID and CLS scores using Google PageSpeed Insights.

So let’s define every one of these core web vitals metrics:

A. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a Core Web Vital metric that measures the time it takes a page to load from the perspective of an actual user.
In contrast, LCP concentrates on what counts most when it comes to page speed: the ability to view and interact with your page.

Website owners must ensure that their pages load quickly in order to provide a positive user experience, which will make the page more likely to rank higher in Google. When it comes to page speed, LCP concentrates on what’s most important: being able to view and use your page.

Google has specific LCP guidelines where they highlight 3 aspects of the LCP speed: Good, Needs Improvement, and Poor.
In other words, you want all of your website’s pages to reach LCP in less than 2.5 seconds.

That’s why it will be a challenge for the big eCommerce websites, because they have pages with lots of images.
And that’s where strategy plays a big role when finding creative solutions to beat the competitors.

What can we do to improve website’s LCP?

1. Optimize images: Compress and resize images to reduce their file size, and use appropriate image formats (e.g. JPEG for photographs, PNG for graphics with transparent backgrounds).
2. Minimize resource load times: Use browser caching, minify and combine CSS and JavaScript files, and use a content delivery network (CDN) to reduce the time it takes for resources to be loaded from a server.
3. Remove unnecessary third-party scripts: If your website uses a lot of third-party scripts, consider removing or delaying the load of those that are not essential to the initial loading of the page.
4. Prioritize the above-the-fold content: Use techniques such as lazy loading, code splitting and preloading to ensure that the most important content is loaded first.
5. Optimize the server response time: Make sure your server is configured properly, using best practices like using gzip compression, using HTTP2 and even investigate for non-optimal database queries
6. Measure and Monitor: Use web vitals analytics tools like Google Analytics, Lighthouse, and PageSpeed Insights to measure and monitor your website’s LCP and other CWVs, so that you can identify and fix any issues.

 

B. First Input Delay (FID) is a metric that measures the time from when a user first interacts with a website (e.g. clicks a link, taps a button) to the time when the browser is able to respond to that interaction. The lower the FID, the better the user experience will be. A good FID should be less than 100 milliseconds.

What can we do to improve website’s FID?

Improving FID often requires a deeper understanding of the JavaScript codebase, some of the things that could be done to improve the FID are:

1. Minimizing the amount of JavaScript code that needs to be parsed and executed on initial load.
2. Avoiding long-running JavaScript tasks in the main thread such as parsing, compiling, and executing complex scripts.
3. Breaking down complex JavaScript tasks into smaller chunks that can be executed asynchronously.
4. Loading and executing essential scripts as soon as possible.

C. Cumulative Layout Shift(CLS) is a metric that measures the unexpected layout changes that happen during the loading of a webpage. It’s a measure of visual stability, which is an important aspect of user experience, as layout shifts can be disruptive and jarring for users.

Layout shifts can happen for a variety of reasons, such as webfonts and ads taking longer to load than the initial layout, images without specified dimensions and dynamically added elements without proper size, among others.

It quantifies the unexpected layout shifts that occur during the loading and user interaction with a page. A good CLS score is anything less than 0.1, although a score of 0.25 or lower is considered acceptable, although it’s recommended to have score as close to 0 as possible. This metric helps measure the visual stability of a website, which is important for a good user experience.

What can we do to improve website’s CLS?

There are several ways to improve the CLS score of a website:

1. Reserve space for ads and other dynamic content: Ads and other dynamic content, such as user-generated comments, can cause layout shifts if they are not properly reserved. By reserving space for these elements, you can prevent layout shifts from occurring.
2. Avoid injecting new content above existing content: When new content is injected above existing content, it can push the content down and cause layout shifts. To avoid this, try to insert new content below existing content, or use a technique such as lazy loading to load new content only when it is needed.
3. Use size and aspect ratio attributes for images and videos: By using size and aspect ratio attributes for images and videos, the browser can reserve the appropriate space, so the layout does not shift when the actual media is loaded.
4. Use of CSS Grid and Flexbox: Using these layout methods you can define the layout of elements to be more stable and better defined
5. Use font-display : This css property allow you to control how font’s are loaded, by default or by using the swap value you can avoid FOIT (Flash of invisible text) which can cause layout shifts.
6. Minimize use of position: absolute and position: fixed: These are some of the most common causes of layout shifts, because they do not reserve space for the element.
7. testing and monitoring: Always monitor your website and test for CLS, this will allow you to detect issues and fix them promptly.

It’s recommended to run the Lighthouse tool that can give you an idea of how your website is performing in terms of CLS, along with other metrics.

How to improve Core Web Vitals in general?

There are several ways that website owners and developers can improve their Core Web Vitals scores. One way is to optimize the images on the site. Large images can slow down the loading time of a page, so it is important to ensure that all images are properly sized and compressed.

Another way to improve Core Web Vitals is to minimize the use of third-party scripts and plugins. These can also slow down the loading time of a page and increase the CLS score. If they are necessary, it is important to ensure that they are optimized and load as quickly as possible.

 

Why Are Core Web Vitals Important?

 

Google formally included Page Experience as a ranking factor. Core Web Vitals have become particularly important parts of your Page Experience score.

We will introduce a new signal that combines Core Web Vitals with our existing signals.

– Google –

Google uses these metrics as a ranking factor in its search algorithm, so optimizing for CWV can help improve a website’s visibility in search results.

They include metrics related to loading, interactivity, and visual stability, which are considered important indicators of a website’s overall user experience.

Another important factor is the use of a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN is a network of servers that are used to deliver content to users based on their geographic location. By using a CDN, website owners can ensure that their content is delivered quickly and efficiently to users around the world.

It is also important to ensure that a website is mobile-friendly. With the increasing number of users accessing the internet on their smartphones, it is essential that websites are designed to be easily viewed and navigated on mobile devices. Google has a Mobile-Friendly Test tool that can be used to check if a website is mobile-friendly.

Improving Core Web Vitals can be a complex and time-consuming process, but the benefits are well worth the effort. A faster, more user-friendly website can lead to higher search rankings, more traffic, and ultimately, more success for the business.

In conclusion, Core Web Vitals are a set of performance metrics that measure the speed and usability of a website.

They are an important factor in SEO and can affect the ranking of a website in search results.

By optimizing images, minimizing the use of third-party scripts and plugins, using caching and a CDN, and ensuring that a website is mobile-friendly, website owners and developers can improve their Core Web Vitals scores and enhance the user experience of their site.

Our team can help you fix those technical issues, just go to our website and fill up the form so one of our team will contact you and send you your free website audit, and schedule a free consultation.