You might think that installing a bunch of plugins is the easiest way to improve your Core Web Vitals in WordPress. However, that’s not the smartest way to go about it. Plugins can add bloat and slow down your site, which defeats the purpose of improving your web performance. Instead, you should focus on optimizing your site’s code, images, and content.
But before you do that, it would be wise to learn a little more about what Improve Core Web Vitals mean.
What Are Google Core Web Vitals?
Do you want to know how to make your website faster, smoother, and more user-friendly? Then you need to learn about Google Core Web Vitals. These are a set of metrics that Google uses to measure and rank the quality of your web pages. They focus on three aspects: how fast your page loads, how responsive it is to user input, and how stable it is visually.
By optimizing your website for Core Web Vitals, you can provide a better experience for your visitors and boost your SEO.
Let’s start with an overview of the Core Web Vitals metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures how long it takes for the largest content element on the page to load. It reflects how quickly the page provides useful information to the user. A good LCP score is 2.5 seconds or less.
- First Input Delay (FID): This measures how long it takes for the page to respond to the first user interaction, such as clicking a button or entering text. It reflects how responsive the page is to user input. A good FID score is 100 milliseconds or less.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This measures how much the layout of the page shifts during loading. It reflects how stable the page is visually. A good CLS score is 0.1 or less.
How to measure Core Web Vitals?
If you want to measure Core Web Vitals, you have several tools to choose from. Some of them are lab tools, which simulate a page load in a controlled environment. Others are field tools, which collect data from real users on your website. In this way, you can get both synthetic and real-world insights into your web performance.
Some of the tools you may use:
- PageSpeed Insights: This tool provides both lab and field data for Core Web Vitals and other performance metrics. It also gives suggestions on how to improve your page speed.
- Chrome UX Report: This tool provides field data for Core Web Vitals and other user experience metrics aggregated from Chrome users who have opted-in to syncing their browsing history. You can access it through the PageSpeed Insights API or Google Data Studio.
- Web-vitals library: This is a JavaScript library that you can use to measure Core Web Vitals on your own website. It sends the metrics to Google Analytics or any other analytics platform that you use.
Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that measure how fast, responsive, and stable your web pages are
How to Boost Core Web Vitals in WordPress
How can you boost your Core Web Vitals scores? It depends on several factors that affect your WordPress site’s speed and usability.
First, you need a reliable hosting provider that can deliver your site quickly and smoothly. Second, you need a well-designed theme that looks good and works well on different devices. Third, you need plugins that add functionality without slowing down your site. Fourth, you need images that are optimized for the web in terms of size and format. Fifth, you need clean and efficient code that follows best practices and standards. Sixth, you need content that is structured and readable for your visitors.
In this section, we will show you how to optimize each of these factors for better Core Web Vitals scores.
Some tricks to nail it
If you want to improve your Core Web Vitals, you need to focus on some of the following aspects:
- Choose a fast and reliable hosting provider: Your hosting provider plays a crucial role in your site speed and performance. Choose a hosting provider that offers SSD storage, CDN integration, caching features, and HTTPS support.
- Use a lightweight and responsive theme: Your theme determines the look and feel of your site, but also its loading time and layout stability. Use a theme that is optimized for speed, mobile-friendliness, and accessibility. Avoid themes that have too many features or options that you don’t need.
- Minify and combine your CSS and JavaScript files: Your CSS and JavaScript files can add extra weight and requests to your site, which can slow down your loading time and increase your FID score. Use a plugin like Autoptimize or WP Rocket to minify and combine your CSS and JavaScript files, and defer or async them if possible.
- Optimize your images: Images are often the largest content elements on your page, which can affect your LCP score. Use a plugin like Smush or ShortPixel to compress and resize your images, and serve them in WebP format if supported by the browser. Also, use lazy loading to delay loading images that are not in the viewport.
- Avoid unnecessary layout shifts: Layout shifts can occur when elements on your page change their position or size during the loading process, which can affect your CLS score. To avoid this, make sure to specify the width and height attributes for your images and videos, use placeholders or skeleton screens for dynamic content, and avoid inserting ads or pop-ups above the fold.
Conclusion
Core Web Vitals are important metrics that measure how fast, responsive, and stable your web page is. By optimizing your website for these metrics, you can provide a better experience for your visitors and boost your SEO.
You should start working on your Core Web Vitals as soon as possible and enjoy the benefits of a smooth and responsive website.
Improving Core Web Vitals is not only good for SEO, but also for conversions and engagement. However, keep in mind that web performance is an ongoing process that requires constant monitoring and testing. Therefore, don’t stop after you achieve good scores🔥. Instead, keep looking for ways to make your web page even better. After all, your visitors deserve the best!
