Why Core Web Vitals Matter: Proven Hacks to Enhance Your Website’s Health
You are doing everything properly but still, your website performance is not improving. Well, let’s talk about Core Web Vitals. You may find these like another technical metric, but they are very different from that. Basically, Core Web Vitals are important indicators of your website’s health and user experience. And this is why you can’t ignore them.
So, what are Core Web Vitals? Why should you care? Most importantly how can you enhance these metrics to make sure that your website is performing well? In this blog, we will discuss all that and give you some proven hacks to improve your Core Web Vitals for a faster and more user-friendly website.
What are Core Web Vitals?
Before we jump into the how let’s understand the what. Core Web Vitals are a set of factors Google considers in a webpage’s overall user experience. Core Web Vitals focus on three main areas:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – It measures a website’s loading performance.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) – It captures a user’s first impression of a website’s interactivity.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – It evaluates the visual stability of a website.
Each of the above factors of Core Web Vitals contributes to how fast and user-friendly your website is. Now, you might be thinking why do these factors matter so much? Let’s understand
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): LCP focuses on the time it takes for the largest element on your page to load. It can be any image, a video, or a large block of text, the faster it loads the better will be experience. If the website’s LCP is slow then it can make users leave your website in frustration. A website’s LCP should be within 2.5 seconds or less of a page starting to load.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Interaction to Next Paint usually measures the time it takes for a website to respond after a user interacts with it, such as by clicking a button or a link. If a user finds your website sluggish and doesn’t reach fast, the user may leave. A good FID score should be less than 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Have you ever tried clicking on something, only for the page to shift at the last second, making you click the wrong thing? That’s what cumulative layout shift measures – the visual stability of your page. Elements that shift during loading lead to a bad user experience. If you want to maintain a good CLS score, your layout shift should be less than 0.1.
Note: Interaction to Next Paint is an official Core Web Vital. INP replaced First Input Display (FID) on March 12, 2024, as the new responsiveness metric. Chrome has officially depreciated support for FID from 9 September 2024
Why do Core Web Vitals Matter?
Why do Core Web Vitals even matter? Suppose, you visit a website, what do you expect? Do you want it to load fast, and respond immediately when you click on something, and you don’t want jumping around as it loads? Right? This is exactly what Core Web Vitals are about. Core Web Vitals measure the experience users have on your website in terms of loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.
If a website doesn’t load faster, visitors are going to bounce because no one has the patience for that. Google considers these metrics as a ranking factor, which means if your website is performing well in these areas, it is more likely to rank higher in search results. A higher ranking means more visibility, more visitors and more conversions.
Proven Hacks to Enhance Your Website’s Health
Now, that you know why Core Web Vitals are so important, let’s see some hacks to improve them.
Optimize Images for Faster Loading
One of the main reasons for a poor LCP score is oversized images. High-resolution images can take so much time to load which can slow down your website.
What’s the solution?
You can compress and resize the images to reduce their file size without even compromising the quality. Also, use modern image formats such as WebP, which offers high quality with smaller file sizes. Implement lazy load images to defer their loading until they come into the user’s viewport.
Minimize JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files
Having too much JavaScript can slow down how quickly users can interact with your website. These may contain unnecessary white space, making their size bigger which negatively affects the website performance. By doing this you’ll reduce the time it takes for your website to respond to user actions.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Content Delivery Network (CDN) distributes your content across multiple servers globally which reduces the time it takes to load your website for users in different locations.
Implement Proper Font Loading Strategies
Believe it or not, your web fonts can have a major impact on your CLS score. When fonts load late, it causes text to shift around and creates a poor user experience. How you can prevent that is Preload your fonts using the <link rel=”preload”> tag to reduce load time.
Eliminate Render Blocking Resources
Render-blocking elements refer to the HTML, CSS and JavaScript files needed to render a page on your website. Render-blocking files can prevent your users from viewing content that is created by third-party plugins and tools like Google Analytics.
However, you can prevent these scripts from hurting your website by eliminating render-blocking resources. Also, you can minify your CSS and JavaScript files to reduce their size.
Implement a Caching Solution
If you want to improve your website health then caching your content is one of the main hacks. Because doing this can reduce the load on your server. So, implementing a premium caching solution can be very helpful for improving your website performance.
Implement Lazy Loading
Lazy loading can help your images load exactly when users reach that part of your web page, rather than loading at the same time as everything else on the page. Lazy loading images can help you improve your website’s LCP score and loading speed.
Defer JavaScript Loading
To improve your website’s INP score you can use a technique called deferring JavaScript loading. This is just another way to eliminate render-blocking elements. This process can make your web pages load faster because it delays the loading of JavaScript. You can also configure your website settings so that critical CSS loads “above the fold content” more quickly. Here “Above the fold” refers to those elements that appear first on a website page.
Conclusion
Despite the Core Web Vitals have become a major ranking factor, don’t worry, your website is not going to fall in Google search results overnight.
As we are in 2024, it is a good time to start working on improvements, as doing so will not only maintain your current position but also improve your website ranking on Google.