Core Web Vitals are fundamentally metrics that are used to measure the overall performance of a webpage. It measures the speed, rate of interactivity, and stability of your webpage. They are used as signals to analyze how well your page is running. For example, it measures site speed, which is an important determining factor of sites’ performance. If your page has a slow loading speed, it will lead to poor user engagement and can in return higher bounce rates. Poor performance affects your website’s SEO as well as user experience which can either make or break your business.
What are the three basic Core Web Vitals?
Table of Contents
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric measures how much time it takes for your page’s main content to load on the page. For example, how long it takes for the largest elements such as images and videos to load on your webpage. If your LCP is less than 2.5 seconds, that means it’s a good rating for maximum user experience.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): It measures the total time taken by your page to become stable. For all the elements on a page do not load at the same speed and sometimes elements like images overlap the written content while loading. Ideally CLS must be less than 0.1 to ensure quality user experience.
First Input Delay (FID): this metric measures the amount of time taken by the browser to begin responding when a user interacts with your page for the first time. Basically, it measures the responsiveness of your web page. For a good user experience, your page’s FID should be less than 100 milliseconds.
Optimize Core Web Vitals to ensure high ranking in search results:
- Using a caching tool: Implementing a caching tool is a way of improving your page’s FID score. Caching reduces server load. A caching solution will store HTML versions of your page, so it does not need to load every time a visitor comes on your page, thus improving performance.
- Get rid of Render-Blocking Resources: Render-Blocking Resources are the scripts, HTML and CSS that delay and sometimes even block the browser from rendering your page. HTML JavaScript and CSS are files that block users from viewing content of your page. Therefore, you need to eliminate render blocking resources to minify unused scripts and CSS. One way to do this is by using effective tools such as CSS Minifier. You can remove white spaces and useless comments to minimize unused CSS and scripts.
- Leverage Content Delivery Networks: CDN or content delivery networks are servers that can store your content. The servers that are closer to the users can serve them the contents of your webpage. CDN can improve user experience by lowering LCP time of your users.
- Optimize image size: You need to optimize your page’s image size to ensure maximum user experience. Because bigger images mean larger file size and therefore more time to load. There are various image compressor tools available online that can reduce the file size while keeping your content intact. Your images should be having the right size and right dimension. Also, using the right attributes is essential for your browser to allot the right space for all your elements in your webpage
- Optimize font size: Just like images, font sizes also influence loading speed. Therefore, you need to optimize your font size to ensure fast loading. Your website’s browser needs to download the whole family of font, hence, using fallback fonts can cause layout shifts, hurting your pages overall performance.
- Upgrading web hosting: If your page takes forever to load, it might be time for you to upgrade your web hosting. The hosting providers directly influence user experience by controlling your page’s speed and security. Therefore, if you have a website that is larger and more complex, consider upgrading web hosting for faster loading time. Instead of using shared hosting, go for dedicated servers.
Conclusion:
Taking care of your page’s Coral Web Vitals is an effective measure to ensure online success. These metrics not just help you rank well in Google’s search result, but also enhance user experience. There are a number of tools and plugins that you can use to improve Coral Web Vitals. Analyzing Coral Web Vitals focuses on serving best page experience to the users, it’s an extended SEO strategy.