Core Web Vitals: What Are They and How to Improve Yours

What are Core Web Vitals (CWV)? When you open a webpage, it’s like putting together a puzzle. Forms, pictures, and headlines show up individually, and how fast they appear affects how quickly the page loads. Ensuring your webpage loads fast is super important to keep visitors happy and meet CWV standards. To do that, you need to get familiar with the CWV metrics.

What Core Web Vitals Should I Measure?

There are three main CWVs that you should measure:

1. LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): It tells you how long the largest piece of content (such as an image or text block) becomes visible within a user’s viewport. For an optimal user experience, LCP should take place within 2.5 seconds after page load.
2. FID (First Input Delay): It refers to the time a web page takes to respond to its first user interaction, such as clicking a button or link, within 100 milliseconds. To create an optimal user experience, this threshold should not exceed 100 milliseconds.
3. CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): It measures the visual stability of a web page by measuring unexpected layout shifts of content and elements on it, such as when users attempt to interact with them. A good user experience can be indicated by a CLS score below 0.1.

Additional Web Performance Metrics:

• Time to First Byte (TTFB): Reflects server responsiveness.
• Time to Interactive (TTI): It measures when a web page becomes interactive.
• Total Blocking Time (TBT): Measures the time the main thread is blocked.
• First Contentful Paint (FCP): Tracks initial rendering time.
• Time to First Meaningful Paint (TTFMP): Measures when valuable content is displayed.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Upcoming metric measuring user interaction to browser response time.

These metrics offer a more nuanced view of web performance, covering various aspects such as server response, rendering, interactivity, and user experience. Monitoring and optimizing these metrics can help ensure a faster, more reliable, and user-friendly website.

Page Performance Scores

A Page Performance Index represents a unified gauge encompassing all crucial user experience parameters within the world of Core Web Vitals. This index employs a comprehensive scoring methodology, amalgamating data from both mobile and desktop interactions. Through a weighted averaging process, it provides a singular score, offering a rapid assessment tool for identifying pages warranting further scrutiny.

Even though the Page Performance Index simplifies the metrics, developers can still pinpoint scores within individual categories, categorized as follows: 90 or above (excellent), 50–90 (requiring enhancement), and below 50 (subpar).

How to Fix Core Web Vitals Issues?

Let’s examine some practical steps for improving the CWV on your site, like SEO and user satisfaction metrics. Improving these metrics boosts your SEO and creates a better browsing experience for visitors.

Step 1: Evaluate Your Website’s Performance

Utilize tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or Web Vitals Extension, which provide valuable data on key web vitals – helping identify areas for improvement.

Step 2: Optimize Your Images.

Large, high-res images can slow your website. Compress images, resize them for web use, and utilize formats like WebP to improve performance.

Step 3: Employ browser caching.

This stores portions of your site within a user’s browser memory to load faster upon return visits.

Step 4: Trim CSS and JavaScript code.

CSS and JavaScript can slow things down considerably, so use tools or plugins to minimize them and ensure faster responsiveness by taking steps such as “lazy loading.”

Step 5: Address Layout Shifts.

To avoid layout shifts, when adding content over existing items, try only doing so in response to user action and specify image and video dimensions to avoid shifting of visuals and video streams.

Step 6: Prioritize by Label.

At first, focus on all pages marked “Poor.” Address any large issues impacting key URLs before moving to anything marked as “Needs Improvement.”

Step 7: Generating a to-do list.

Prioritize tasks for the website team. Consider these fixes in future updates:

• Keep page size under 500KB while working to minimize page load time)
• Target no more than 50 resources per mobile page, and consider using AMP for faster loading times.

How to Improve Core Web Vitals?

Improving CWV is essential to optimizing both user experience and search engine ranking of any website. These metrics measure how quickly and smoothly a webpage loads and becomes interactive; Google uses them as part of its ranking algorithm. Below are some best practices for increasing Core Web Vitals:

1. Give mobile optimization a top priority. With Google’s mobile-first indexing, your mobile website is often the first impression visitors get of your business – make sure it functions seamlessly across devices!
2. Take advantage of Content Delivery Networks (CDN). CDNs allow your site to load faster by storing copies in multiple places so users have an optimal experience no matter where they access your page from.
3. Make your page load quicker by employing preloading tricks and instructing the browser to fetch resources before they’re needed, saving time. 4. Implement server-side rendering (SSR). This technology sends fully rendered pages directly from a server to a browser for faster loading speeds, improving user experiences.
4. Optimize font delivery. Fonts can slow things down. For quicker visual rendering, host fonts locally, compress them, and utilize modern formats that support faster visual rendering.
5. Keep your website fresh through regular testing and updates using tools such as Lighthouse or CrUX to identify and resolve performance issues as they emerge over time.

By following these tips, you’ll improve the CWV of your site while offering users an outstanding experience.

Fixing Core Web Vitals is an important part of ranking your site higher. But don’t forget other SEO aspects, such as link building. Outreach Bee is here to support your SEO efforts through high quality manual link building. Go ahead and contact us to discuss the best strategy for your business.