Do you own a website? If so, then you most probably know about Core Web Vitals and their great importance. However, if you do not know what these are, or you just got your website recently, it is high time you became familiar with them. After all, your knowledge of Core Web Vitals can have a great impact on the search engine visibility and user experience provided by your website.
In this article, you will learn what Core Web Vitals are, as well as their importance in boosting the success of a website. Read on also to find out how you can improve your own Core Web Vitals, hence boost your website’s Google ranking.
What Are Core Web Vitals?
It can be defined as a subset of factors that measure the visual stability, speed and responsiveness of a website. This set of metrics make a major part of the “page experience” score provided by Google. In other words, Google uses these factors to evaluate the overall user experience of a website.
The Core Web Vitals of a website can be found in the Google Search Console account, under the ‘enhancements’ section.
Why Are Core Web Vitals Important?
Just as their name suggests, Core Web Vitals are very important set of metrics. Google considers these to be ranking signals, even giving them more importance than other ranking factors, such as HTTPS security, mobile optimization and safe browsing.
However, Core Web Vitals offer more benefits than just ensuring a website ranks well in Google. The following are two additional benefits provided by this set of site aspects:
Ø They ensure a website is user-friendly.
Ø They promote a positive user experience.
The Three Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals can be majorly broken down into three specific user interaction and page speed measurements:
1. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
2. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
3. First Input Delay (FID)
Google rates all these three categories on a scale that ranges from ‘Poor’ to ‘Needs Improvement’ to ‘Good.’ And knowing the details about each category is very important; with such essential information, a website owner will be able to tell which site aspect they should focus more on improving.
Consider what each of these Core Web Vitals entails:
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
CLS measures the visual stability of a website. In other words, it analyzes how stable a webpage is while it loads. The level of a site’s visual visibility can be affected by unexpected changes in the layout, sporadic late-loading of content and local advertisements or website pop-ups.
Consider how Google ranks websites relative to their FID measurements:
Ø Good – A website with a visual stability score of less than 0.1.
Ø Needs Improvement – A website with a visual stability score of between 0.1 and 0.25.
Ø Poor – A website with a visual stability score of more than 0.1
Here are useful tips that can help you minimize the CLS scores of your website:
Ø Always use specific size attributes and dimensions for any media, such as GIFs, videos and images.
Ø New UI elements should always be added below the fold; this ensures that they do not push content down and promote a negative user experience.
Ø Ensure that all ads elements have their set reserved spaces.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Largest Contentful Paint measures the total time it takes for a page to load. It is usually measured in seconds and is calculated from an actual user’s point of view. In simpler terms, LCP can be described as the time a page takes to load the majority of its content on-screen, once a link has been clicked.
Consider how Google ranks websites relative to their LCP measurements:
Ø Good – A website that loads all its contents in less than 2.5 seconds.
Ø Needs Improvement – A website that loads between 2.5 seconds and 4.0 seconds.
Ø Poor – A website that takes more than 4.0 seconds to load.
Other page speed metrics, such as First Contextual Paint and TTFB, do not fully analyze the experience of users when opening a webpage. On the contrary, LCP primarily focuses on the user’s ability to see and interact with the webpage. By so doing, it establishes the accurate user experience of an actual user on the website.
The following are effective tips that can help you improve the LCP of your website:
Ø Remove all unneeded 3rd-party scripts – Such 3rd-party scripts slow down a page by 34 milliseconds.
Ø Set up lazy loading – This refers to the process of delaying loading of images, such that it only load when the user scrolls down the page.
Ø Upgrade your web hosting service – That is why, you should use a reliable and fast web hosting service provider but better performance of your web page.
Ø Remove large page elements – You can use Google PageSpeed Insights to identify and remove any large elements that might be slowing it down.
First Input Delay (FID)
FID measures the speed and level of user interactivity in a website. It is the time taken by a user (in milliseconds) to actually interact with the contents of the site. Simply put, First Input Delay answers the question: ‘Can users interact well with the webpage?’
Consider how Google ranks websites relative to their FID measurements:
Ø Good – Users take less than 100 milliseconds to interact with the site.
Ø Needs Improvement – Users take between 100 and 300 milliseconds to interact with the site.
Ø Poor – Users take more than 100 milliseconds to interact with the site.
The following are some tips you can apply to improve the FID scores of your site:
Ø Use a browser cache – Browser cache encourages fast loading of content on a page.
Ø Defer or minimize JavaScript – As the browser loads up JavaScript, users can hardly interact with the page. To prevent this, always minimize or defer JavaScript.
Ø Remove all non-essential 3rd-party scripts – Such third-party scripts affect FID negatively.
Conclusion
As a website owner, you undoubtedly wish to boost the search engine results and user experience of your site. And improving the aspects of your Core Web Vitals can help you achieve all that.
For more information on how to make your Core Web Vitals more effective, consult us today; our team of professionals will guide you on how to improve these, such that you achieve a fully-functional website.