7 Ways To Improve Your Website’s Core Web Vitals
By Aslam Saah
Do you want to improve core web vitals for WordPress?
Google initiated core web vitals to help WordPress site owners in improving the quality and user experience. This article covers methods that would help you improve WordPress core web vitals with easy understanding.
In this article, you will learn about Google web vitals, their importance, and how to improve them in WordPress.
So, read this guide to uncover all the aspects of WordPress core web vitals.
What are Google Core web vitals?
Core web vitals defines performance metrics for a WordPress site and cannot be left out with Google’s algorithms. Google considers these core web vitals as performance metrics for better user experience.
The SEO of your WordPress site is greatly impacted by the Google score for core web vitals. So, you really shouldn’t miss out on any factors to improve it.
If your site is slow and not fully functional, then Google won’t like it and will rate your site poorly. Google and your users don’t like a slow-loading site. But do you know what factors are affecting the site’s speed?
To uncover these factors, you should consider web vitals that help you measure your site’s visibility and loading speed.
Google runs 3 quality tests for web vitals. These are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): It could be any content on your website that becomes visible to the users quickly. When you test your site with speed test tools, your site might show fast speed but users may not still face slow page loading speed. With LCP, Google can measure web vital scores for kindle thinking.
- First Input Delay (FID): FID is the time it takes to process the events after a user interacts or takes action on your site. The action could be clicking on a link and redirecting to another website. It could also be filling a subscription form, and waiting for the site to process the request. FID measures the time delay between two sequences of events.
- Cumulative layout Shift (CLS): CLS measures the time it takes for all the elements of a page to load quickly. Let us consider that a user lands on your webpage and is engaged in reading an article. But if a video embed loads in the middle and distracts the user, then it would be quite frustrating. If the content keeps moving on the page, the user might not be able to take any action like subscribing to the email list.
All these terms are technical and you may not be familiar with them. But don’t worry, you can test the score and then improve these settings.
How To Test the Score of Google Core Web Vitals?
By using the Page Speed Insights tool, you can test the score of WordPress core web vitals. Just enter the WordPress site URL, and click on Analyze. You can see the core web vitals metrics under the Field Data Section.
The metrics are displayed as green, orange, & red with the score. To pass the test, you need to score at least 2.5s for LCP, <100ms for FID, and <0.1 for CLS.
The tools not only allow you to test individual pages, but you can also view web vitals for the root domain. By clicking on Show origin summary, you can check the aggregate of all pages.
If you want to go deep into the Core web vitals report, you can get it in the Google Search Console.
You can also inspect it with the Lighthouse. Open your site in Chrome incognito mode. Right-click on the screen, click on Inspect, and you will find the Lighthouse option. Finally, click on the Generate Report button, and analyze your site for errors and fix them to improve its performance.
Why is WordPress core web vitals important?
WordPress core web vitals is important because it helps you not only to boost the site speed but also improve user experience. It measures the performance of our site for faster loading and visibility. If the page loads slowly, the bounce rate increases, and the conversion rate decreases.
You might have a fast-loading website, but the page views and user experience could be poor. The best remedy is to improve core web vitals.
One of the ranking factors in Google’s search algorithm is page experience that solely depends on core web vitals.
Till now we have discussed core web vitals, their testing, and their importance. Now let’s drill down into the methods to optimize WordPress core web vitals.
Optimize Your WordPress Site Hosting
Web hosting plays a vital role in WordPress site speed & performance. With so many web hosting available, it could be a daunting task to choose one.
I recommend you choose WordPress hosting instead of shared hosting. If your budget is high, then you might go for VPS or cloud hosting.
Some popular cloud hosting services are UpCloud, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud platform, and more. If you choose cloud hosting, you have to set up WordPress on your own that requires technical skills. If you are a newbie, you should choose Managed WordPress hosting.
You can get premium WordPress hosting at an affordable price from SeekaHost’s WordPress Hosting plans. Check out the plans here.
Use a CDN Service
CDN or content delivery network serves website content from several servers located around the world. So, even if one server goes down, your site will be up and running with another server.
Users can download images and other static files quickly as CDN serves these using the nearest server at speed. Ultimately the site load balance reduces and loads quickly for users around the world.
The best free CDN service is Cloudflare. You can add your website to Cloudflare for free and install its plugin in the WordPress dashboard. The plugin allows you to manage everything from within the dashboard.
At Cloudflare, you can activate a free SSL and secure your site. You can check the performance and total files cached in a month.
With a CDN, the WordPress core web vitals will improve a lot with tremendous results. Apart from Cloudflare, you can also consider some premium CDN like
Eliminate Render Blocking Elements
The render-blocking elements have a huge impact on the core web vitals as they block other elements from loading first. These elements are CSS and JavaScript files from third-party tools or plugins. If you test a website with Google Pagespeed Insights, you will find out the render-blocking elements.
You should optimize render-blocking elements by eliminating unwanted plugins and tools that are not needed. When eliminating these elements, make sure you don’t change the coding of your site or else everything will be a mess.
The best plugins to do this are:
Reduce the Image Size
There are plenty of plugins to optimize the image size for fast website loading. Out there, you will find many tools like Shortpixel that help you reduce the image size without changing its quality.
Uploading images with a huge file size reduces the site’s speed which at times is not necessary. When choosing a WordPress theme, ensure that the theme is mobile responsive.
You can use a number of plugins like-
This is because the image size and quality should look the same and fit the device screen.
Therefore, optimizing image is another aspect that improves a website’s core web vitals.
Improving Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
As discussed earlier, LCP accounts for the largest content on the webpage. It could be a featured image in a blog post or infographics. The LCP score will be high if the content loads quickly.
To identify which content is responsible for the low LCP score, you need to expand the metrics tab of LCP in the PageSpeed score.
Once you have identified the content, you can then optimize it or replace it with a reduced size. This will really improve the core web vitals score.
Not necessarily an image, it could be text with a large paragraph. You can break the paragraphs and make it readable.
Improving First Input Delay (FID)
As explained earlier, it is the time delay between the user’s click and the browser processing event. FID score can be improved if the time delay of the event is reduced. This can be done by using Managed WordPress hosting platform.
Managed WordPress hosting uses Google Cloud Platform, so there’s nothing to explain about its performance. GCP offers high speed, security, and increases SEO.
You can improve FID further with a caching plugin like WPRocket or Litespeed Cache. Both these plugins automatically optimize the file size. Simply install the plugin from the plugins section inside the WP dashboard.
Then go to the settings, and customize the file optimization tab. Click on Save changes, and then check the FID score. You will definitely see a lot of improvement and the site will load faster.
Improving Cumulative layout Shift (CLS)
By expanding the CLS tab, you can view the elements that load slowly. Mostly the CLS score is affected due to embeds like Google Ads or any other banner ads. To improve the CLS score, you can define the width and height attributes.
To view which elements affect the CLS score, you can go to the Console and point out each element for their source code.
If you don’t have the technical expertise to do this, then it is recommended to take help from a WordPress developer.
Conclusion
I hope these tips help you improve your Websites core web vitals. It is highly recommended to choose a Managed WordPress hosting, CDN, and cache plugins.
Without much effort, you will see the core web vitals score to be satisfactory.