How To Optimize Your Site For Core Web Vitals?

Are you worried because your website is taking time to load fully? Do you want to improve the user experience of your business site?

If so, Core Web Vitals could be one part you can call responsible for. This blog post will explain how to optimize your site for Core Web Vitals in easy steps.

Core Web Vitals are now a Google ranking factor, and most SEO experts focus on optimizing their sites for them.

Every time Google rolls an update, people face an increase or decrease in their overall ranking. Those with good metrics of Web Vitals sustain position and retain their visitors.

So, how can one follow the best practices to avoid any harm to their website ranking? The short answer is to improve your “Core Web Vitals” metrics!

Optimizing Your Site For Core Web Vitals: Overview

Core Web Vitals are now essential factors and have become integral parts of search engine optimization (SEO). It’s necessary to optimize these metrics regularly by giving them more time. It’ll help improve the user experience and ranking of your website.

We all believe that better content ranks better on search engines. But SEOs know what other things can effectively bring better content to the top and then the first position. So, to explain this factor to maintain your web position, we’re going to discuss it further.

What Are Basically Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are some specific metrics for measuring the overall user experience of your business site page(s). They have three different scores showing page loading time, design stability, speed, and user interaction.

If we look at them a little deeper, they include:

We’re mentioning it again; you must optimize these three metrics to make your site perform at its best. Google uses all these scores to rank your web pages. Before explaining how to improve each of them, you should know why they are so valued.

Why Should You Optimize Your Site for Core Web Vitals?

Getting a good score on these criteria will impact the overall performance of your website. If you have hired an SEO for improving your Core Web Vitals score, your time and investment are worth each penny. You’ll enjoy the following benefits once you attain the best possible results.

Best Tips To Optimize Your Site Core Web Vitals

Now, it’s time to learn how to optimize your site for Core Web Vitals tests. As there are three different metrics, we’ll explain each one separately. We’ll let you know how to analyze them, the reasons for bad scores, and how you can improve them.

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) Analysis and Optimization

LCP focuses on only one element; your site load time. If users do not see what they are looking for within a second, they will leave the site. So, all the content on your website page must load at once and fast.

Analyze LCP

To analyze LCP, you can use some methods and especially tools, which are as under:

• Use DevTools Lighthouse of Chrome or any Chromium-based browser.
• For non-Chromium-based browsers, use PageSpeed Insights or the web.dev tool.
• Use Web Vitals extension; it’s a very effective tool with score indicators.
• You can go with the web-vitals JavaScript library if you can code.
• Take help from Google’s Search Console’s Core Web Vitals feature.

Bad LCP: Why

Before optimizing LCP, it’s necessary to know the reasons behind it. So, here are a few causes your website has a low LCP score.

• The server responds slowly to shared hosting services, and page rendering takes time.
• Render-blocking resources on HTML can prevent pages from loading quickly.
• Large unoptimized images and videos can consume more bandwidth and render slowly.
• Content loading and display issues are present on the client-side rather than the server.

Here is an example for bad LCP!

Optimize LCP

Once you understand the causes that result in poor LCP, it’s easy to optimize each of them. So, let’s move ahead and check how you can do this.

2. First Input Delay (FID) Analysis and Optimization

FID focuses on the usability of your site, whether the user can interact with your page or not. If a user clicks or taps a link and does not open it right away, it means a slow response. So, it would help if you made your other content on website pages respond as quickly as possible.

Analyze FID

So, to analyze if there is any issue with FID, you can go through the following steps:

• Use WebPageTest to find codes blocking the Main Thread when running JavaScript.
• Find Long Tasks, including URLs, through the “Bottom-Up” tab in the Inspect Element.
• Take help from DevTools or PageSpeed Insights to find Total Blocking Time (TBT).
• Use the Chrome Web Vitals extension to know the interaction when a user clicks or scrolls.
• Chrome UX Report helps you find how URLs are performing on different devices.

Bad FID: Why

With poor FID, you can lose most of your new visiting users. When you get a low FID score, the possible reason could be any of these given below:

• JavaScript results in Long Tasks, making your website less responsive.
• Render-blocking resources, CSS and JavaScript, cause delays in page loading.
• Starting large JavaScripts right after loading a page can delay rendering.
• Using third-party or poorly optimized JavaScripts can lead to render-blocking.

Optimize FID

Now, when you find the cause of a low FID score, you can optimize it quickly. So, here are the steps you should follow to do this:

3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) Analysis and Optimization

CLS focuses primarily on your website’s page stability. It looks at your page content and design layout if things move during loading or not. This problem bothers the readers when the text slides off the page. So, you should keep it optimized for the sake of user experience.

Analyze CLS

It’s easy to analyze CLS as it is more common and experienced quickly. You can use the following tools or methods to analyze CLS:

• Use DevTools Lighthouse to find all the issues impacting your layout shift.
• For performing a live performance test, you can use PageSpeed Insights.
• Use web.dev tool for analyzing CLS in real-time on desktop devices.
• Layout Shift GIF Generator can help in finding layout shifts showing the areas.

Bad CLS: Why

Poor CLS metrics can reduce user experience and hence, the overall value of your website. If you get a poor CLS score, it can have any of these reasons.

• Use of excessive ads banners leaving no space for the original content.
• Zero space for images and videos and no attributes given while uploading.
• Placing embeddings such as YouTube videos, Social Media posts, etc., reduces CLS.
• Using any web font that causes FOUT/FOIT can also affect CLS.

Optimize CLS

CLS optimization is necessary to add value to the content you have placed and your user. To optimize CLS, you can perform the following simple steps.

Other Web Vitals Metrics

There are other important web vitals metrics you need to know!

1. FCP – First Contentful Paint

Apart from the above-discussed measurements, you can see one more important metric while checking your site speed on Google page speed insights, and it is nothing but FCP. It is abbreviated as First Contentful Paint which measures the time taken by the page to display something on the white computer screen.

You should understand that this is a Non-Core Web Vitals metric. Google says that 1.8 seconds or less is a good FCP score as it is used to diagnose the LCP issues. Now, you may think about how to get a good FCP score so that your site can pass the CWV assessments.

How To Improve FCP score?

Following are areas you need to focus on in improving the FCP score!

• Focus on reducing your server response time
• Don’t execute page redirections
• Avoid render-blocking resources
• Use an efficient cache plugin to serve static assets
• Preload web fonts for improved loading speed
• Get rid of unused CSS and JavaScript
• Server your site images in next-gen format
• Use a reliable CDN like Cloudflare or BunnyCDN

We have almost followed all the above mention tips to get a decent FCP score! Look at the following picture!

2. TTFB – Time To First Byte

You might have known this primary metric! The expansion of TTFB is “Time To First Byte,” which is an evaluation of your web server’s response to the request. It comes under the other web vitals metric as it is directly related to the page speed load experience and helps to identify the low LCP score issues.

How To Improve TTFB Score?

You should reduce the TTFB score for increased page speed load! Implement the following tips to lower your TTFB metric.

• Use the fastest hosting with premium DNS service (I prefer Cloudways)
• Optimize your Database
• Ensure that you are using the latest PHP version
• Keep your WordPress version, theme, and installed plugins updated.

Wrapping Up The Tips To Optimize Your Website For Core Web Vitals

Well! That’s all about how to optimize your site for Core Web Vitals so far. If you are a business working online or a company selling services, you need to optimize them. It will help rank your website, keep your users engaged, and make them your regular visitors.

If you are doing these processes in the first place, try to read about these tools we mentioned for analysis. Some are pretty basic tools like the PageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console. For optimizing a lot of things, you can also use some speed plugins, such as Autoptimize.

Before performing any step for optimizing Core Web Vitals, make sure you are using good hosting because the web host providers like Cloudways offer features that need little to no optimization. You get most things done by default, leaving less work for you.