The digital world is well-known for communication speeds, social connectivity, learning opportunities, and many other versatile experiences. If you own a website, you would understand when I say that if you are not fast enough, you are not making any profit. A super-fast website would be a dream come true for a site owner.
Why does page performance matter?
Research says that longer page loading time severely affects bounce rates. Bounce rates are the percentage of visitors who ‘Bounce back” to search results after viewing only one page on your website.
For instance, if page load time increases from 1 second to 6 seconds, bounce rate increases by 106%
Therefore, understanding Core Web Vitals for SEO is very important. Google has provided numerous tools to measure and report a website’s performance.
Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide guidance to deliver a great user experience on the web. It helps site owners understand the quality of experience they are providing to their users.
What are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are the subsets of Web vitals that apply to all the web pages. It is a combination of three main performance metrics,
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Cumulative Input Delay (CID)
First Input Delay (FID)
These metrics focus on three aspects of user experience. Which are loading, visibility, and interactivity of a web page.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): It measures the loading performance of a website. When a page starts loading an LCP within 2.5 seconds would deliver a good user experience.
- Cumulative Input Delay (CID): It measures visual stability. Web pages should maintain a CLS of 0.1 or less.
- First Input Delay (FID): It measures interactivity. Pages should have an FID of 100 milliseconds or less.
An example re-stating the usefulness of Google Core Web Vitals,
Vodafone improved their LCP by 31%, which resulted in an 8% increase in sales. An 11% increase in their cart to visit rate, and an 11% increase in their lead to visit rate.
Check out six things you and your developer can do to improve your Google Core Web Vitals scores.
1. Speed up your server
Servers that respond quicker improve site speed metrics. Optimize your server. Optimizing your server can be done in several ways. Firstly, upgrade your hosting plan. Select one that performs well at a fair price. Checking your hardware and seeing if it needs an upgrade would be a good decision. Also, research how your databases work and make improvements.
You can also find out how your server pushes files to clients. There are various ways to enhance this process.
2. Optimize Images
Adding images to your article makes it more interactive and appealing to your users. Another way to improve your Vital scores is to optimize the images on your website properly. Select an appropriate file name, format, and size of the images. A large unoptimized image can reduce loading time and increase bounce rates.
There are multiple tools available online that can help optimize your images. For example, Squoosh is a very user-friendly app that can help optimize your image. There are many other tools while you can explore as well.
3. Reduce JavaScript Execution
If your reports indicate a poor FID score, it indicates that your web page interacts with users over 300 milliseconds. Reducing and optimizing your JS would be the wise thing to do.
One way suggested by Google is by deferring unused JS. You can cut down unused JS with code splitting. Meaning you can fragment your JavaScript into smaller pieces. These measures will improve your FID scores and overall user experience as well.
4. Ensure Key page templates are Mobile-friendly
Nowadays it is essential to optimize your websites for mobile devices. Since 2016, mobile traffic has overtaken desktop traffic.
The content visibility should be of good clarity without zooming In on a mobile device. Monitoring the Mobile Usability Report can give valuable insights into necessary improvements. This report can help you identify if your website content is mobile-friendly or not. It also shows you a list of affected URLs for each issue.
There are various tools such as Mobile-friendly Test to check key page templates.
5. Third-Party Scripts
Many times speed reduces due to outside sources such as online ads. If your site depends on ad scripts, this can be an issue that needs attention. You can only hope that your ad provider optimizes them.
If ads are slowing down your site’s speed you might want to look into other options. Reassess the requirement for a particular ad and replace them if required.
6. Make Regular Audits a Routine
Website security plays a crucial role in the overall user experience. Making content and link audits a routine is required to improve Google Web Vital scores.
The major security issues involve malware, phishing, deceptive content to name a few. Google wants user experience to be extremely safe online. Security issues report in Google Search Console can give insights into any security breaches and provide ways to fix them.
Ensuring a secure and wonderful experience for your users is your duty. Google Web Vitals reports help you achieve it. The above-mentioned tips can reduce the number of red flags that a site owner can receive. There is always a way to fix these flags and restore a smooth user experience.