A website’s performance directly affects both user experience and search engine visibility, potentially impacting your traffic and conversions. Core Web Vitals are a series of performance metrics used by Google’s ranking algorithm to measure how quickly and smoothly websites load and respond. As higher scores in these metrics can lead to better visibility in search results, this post will explain how to optimise your website for Core Web Vitals.
Contents
What are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are a trio of measurements that assess website performance in three areas related to user experience. These are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): LCP measures how quickly the main content of a webpage loads and renders. It specifically looks at the page’s largest visible element, such as a hero image, banner or block of text. Ideally, this element should take less than 2.5 seconds to load.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): NIP is a new metric that replaces First Input Delay (FID). It measures how quickly your site responds to user interactions, such as clicking an internal link, button or menu item. A fast site is expected to respond in under 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). This metric measures the stability of your page’s layout during loading. If late-loading page elements, like ads, widgets or images, cause the layout to shift while the user is reading, it can cause visitors to make errors and makes for a poor experience. Google prefers sites to have a CLS score under 0.1, while scores above 0.25 are considered poor.
Why Core Web Vitals matter for SEO
Competition between search engines means they aim to offer ever better user experiences. Core Web Vitals are directly focused on user satisfaction as they measure load speed, responsiveness and page stability. The fact that Google has made them ranking criteria means that poor performance in any of these metrics can negatively impact your site’s visibility and consequently, your traffic.
The benefit for websites is that improving Core Web Vitals performance doesn’t just increase the potential to rank higher in results, it also means your site offers a better user experience. This can result in greater engagement and higher conversions.
Is your site optimised for search intent? Read: A Guide to Search Intent SEO
How to optimise your website for Core Web Vitals
To ensure you optimise your site effectively for Core Web Vitals, we will look at each metric in turn.
- Improving LCP (loading performance)
As LCP focuses on a page’s largest elements, e.g., banners and hero images, it is the loading times of these that you will need to improve. This can be done in various ways, such as using newer compressed file formats, like WebP; reducing JavaScript and CSS that can block rendering; and using lazy loading, so that important images load before those further down the page. - Accelerating INP (responsiveness)
As with LCP, JavaScript can also impact INP, so it can be beneficial to minimise the use of large JS files. Additionally, remove unnecessary plugins, features or background processes that impact responsiveness and make sure that any tracking scripts or live chat widgets load after the page is fully rendered. - Reducing CLS (layout instability)
You can help to prevent layout shifts by setting the size attributes for images and videos and preloading fonts. Additionally, avoid inserting dynamic content (e.g., ads or banners) above the main content. These often load after the main content and then cause everything to unexpectedly shift downwards.
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Key monitoring tools
It is important to measure your website’s Core Web Vitals performance and regularly monitor it to see if website changes have had an impact. An essential tool for doing this is Google’s PageSpeed Insights, which provides detailed diagnostics and suggestions for improving each metric. If your site is registered with Google Search Console, you can also access Core Web Vitals reports across your URLs.
For more detailed technical insight, developers can use Chrome DevTools to identify slow-loading elements or scripts causing layout shifts.
The role of hosting
Your choice of web host can significantly impact your Core Web Vitals scores. As faster server response times are critical to LCP, look for a provider that offers high-frequency CPUs, SSD or NVMe storage, high-speed RAM and HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 protocols.
In addition, some managed hosting providers also offer a range of other Core Web Vitals-enhancing features. For instance, advanced performance monitoring and real-time resource scaling can ensure responsiveness during busy periods, while caching, compression and server optimisation can improve load times and reduce latency.
For more information, read: How Hosting Choice Affects Website Performance and Core Web Vitals
Conclusion
As Google believes that a fast-loading, responsive and visually stable website offers a better user experience, it has made its trio of Core Web Vitals key ranking criteria. This means websites will need to score highly on these metrics if they wish to perform well in search results. Hopefully, from reading this article, you will better understand what LCP, INP and CLS measure, and know what improvements to make to meet these performance standards.
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