Core web vitals are essential building blocks of every website. They affect how your customers and users experience your website, and if they aren’t up to scratch, they could affect your rankings.
Improving your core web vitals score will enhance your customer experience and can even boost your conversion rate and feedback.
Core Web Vitals
Core web vitals focus primarily on three areas of the user experience:
- Ease of interaction
- Page loading performance
- Visual stability from a user perspective
Three main metrics assess core web vitals:
- Largest contentful paint (LCP)
- Cumulative layout shift (CLS)
- First input delay (FID)
Brands and businesses can combine these metrics to assess where their website can be improved. But how do you improve them, and what do they mean?
Largest Contentful Paint
LCP essentially shows how fast your website pages load for your audience. Pages that load faster tend to rank highly in Google and obtain greater engagement. In contrast, slow loading times can bore your audience and cause them to click away.
Typically, nothing outside the view of the user counts when measuring LCP. Somewhat different from page speed, which measures how long it takes for a user to open a page, LCP considers visuals and interactivity such as images, videos, and text, which should load within two and a half seconds to get the best score.
If your website’s LCP score isn’t as good as you hoped, you can improve it by:
- Upgrading your host – Investing in better hosting for your website can boost your overall loading times, improving your LCP.
- Editing large elements – Large page elements, such as high-resolution images, can reduce your LCP. Remove or edit these to increase your load speed.
- Being lazy – Not literally, but you can set up lazy loading on your site to ensure images only load when your audience scrolls down to them, rather than loading all at once, which improves your LCP.
Cumulative Layout Shift
Your page’s CLS determines how stable it is as it loads. In this instance, stable means that your images load precisely where they need to be, rather than jumping around the page as they settle down, which can lead to users misclicking on elements.
CLS can also push elements, such as banner images, out of the way to the side of the page by jutting out and pushing text or other images elsewhere. Having extensive CLS on your site can look unprofessional and messy, so it is vital to ensure your site is as clean as possible.
The lower your CLS score, the better for your core web vitals. To minimise your CLS, try some of these tips:
- Keep ads to a reserved space – By limiting where any adverts appear, you remove the risk of them pushing other content out of the way.
- Use set sizes for any visual elements – Setting size dimensions on all of your media will guarantee that the browser knows exactly how much space it will take up and where it needs to be.
First Input Delay
FID measures the amount of time it takes for users to interact with your page and carry out actions, such as clicking on a link or choosing a section from your menu. FID is not a significant concern on pages such as blog posts, as these tend not to be majorly interactive. However, FID is a more critical factor for landing pages or login screens.
FID is partially about loading times, as the faster your content loads, the faster your audience will be able to engage with it. A good FID score is around 100 milliseconds, which is a very short time.
If you need to improve your FID, there are a few things that you can do, such as:
- Use browser caches – Browser caches help your content load faster as they store copies of your website’s files, which reduces the work your server needs to do to show a page.
- Remove third-party scripts – Check your code for any non-essential third-party scripts that you can remove to speed up your FID.
Assessing Your Core Vitals
If you are unsure about the performance of your core vitals, there are several ways that you can analyse your site. Google Search Console is the easiest option, as you can assess multiple pages and how well each core web vital performs at once.
Alternatively, software such as Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights boast tools that allow you to examine how well your core web vitals are performing.
Once you have an insight into how your pages are functioning, you can begin to plan how to improve them. As Google ranks the core web vitals, the better yours are, the higher your website will climb in search engine results pages (SERP).
Conclusion
Core web vitals are elements you may not have considered when optimising your website for SEO (search engine optimisation) purposes. However, if your core web vitals are good, your customers will see that you have invested in your site, and the results will encourage them to stay and browse.
