What Are Core Web Vitals and How Do You Optimize Them for SEO?

To rank higher on Google and provide a better user experience for your website visitors, you must pay attention to Core Web Vitals. These are specific factors that Google deems important in a webpage’s overall user experience. They measure how fast your page loads, how responsive, and how stable it is.

Core Web Vitals are crucial for SEO because they affect the user experience of a website. This has implications for your website’s conversions, engagement, and retention. A study by Google shows that websites that meet the Core Web Vitals thresholds have 24% less abandonment during page load than those that don’t.

Therefore, before optimizing your website for SEO, you need to understand Core Web Vitals and how to improve them using best practices. The following sections explain this in detail.

What are the Core Web Vitals metrics and how are they measured?

Core Web Vitals comprise three specific page speed and user interaction measurements: largest contentful paint, first input delay, and cumulative layout shift.

Each of these metrics has a different impact on user experience and a different optimal threshold. These metrics are all available when you check the speed of your webpage using the Eye10 Pagespeed tool, which pulls data from Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix to give you a comprehensive view of the performance of your webpage. Let’s take a closer look at each of the metrics.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

The time it takes for the largest content element on the page to show up to the user is measured by Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). This could be a text block, an image, or a video. LCP indicates how fast your page loads and how quickly users can access the page’s main content. The optimal threshold for LCP is 2.5 seconds or less. Anything above 4 seconds is considered poor and needs improvement.

First Input Delay (FID)

How long does your browser take to wake up and respond to the first user action on the page? That’s what First Input Delay (FID) measures. It could be a tap, a click, or a keypress that triggers the browser. FID tells you how responsive your page is and how fast users can interact with it. The faster, the better. The ideal threshold for FID is 100 milliseconds or less.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures how much the page shuffles around during loading. This happens when elements on the page move their place or size unpredictably, such as ads, images, or fonts. The lower the CLS score, the more satisfied users will be. Therefore, aim for a CLS score of around 0.1 and not more than 0.25.

Here is a chart from Google that lets you know what figures you should be targeting for your optimization:

How to optimize your website for Core Web Vitals using best practices?

Now that you know what Core Web Vitals are and how to check them, you might wonder how to make your website faster and more user-friendly. From the Eye10 Pagespeed tool, once you measure the speed of your page, you also get to see tips that could help you optimize the website’s performance.

Many things can affect your Core Web Vitals scores, but here are some of the most common and effective ones you can do immediately once you perform an SEO audit of your website.

Optimize images and videos

Images and videos can make your page look impressive and inviting, but they can also load slower and bother your users. They are often the largest and most impactful elements on a web page. Here are some best practices to optimize your images and videos:

• Use responsive images that adapt to different screen sizes and resolutions.
• Compress your images and videos to reduce file size without compromising quality.
• Use appropriate formats for your images and videos.

Improve server response time

The server response time is when it takes to send the first byte of data to the browser after receiving a request. A slow server response time can delay the rendering of the page and increase the LCP and FID scores.

You can optimize your website for core web vitals by improving server response time in several ways, such as:

• Implementing caching strategies to reduce the number of requests to your server and speed up the delivery of your site’s content.
• Use a content delivery network (CDN) to distribute your content across multiple servers worldwide.
• Choose a good hosting provider that can handle your website traffic and needs.

Make your website code simpler and cleaner

Website code affects core web vitals by influencing how quickly and smoothly your website loads and interacts with users. Website code is the instructions that tell the browser how to display your website. Complex or inefficient code can cause your website to perform poorly when loaded unto a browser.

Therefore, you should always aim for simple, clean code. Here are some ways to do that:

• Eliminate any unnecessary or unused sections of code from your website.
• Structure your code, so it is clear and comprehensible.
• Load only the code needed for each page or each part of the page.

Minimize layout shifts

Layout shifts are unexpected changes in the position or size of elements on the page during the loading process. They can affect your CLS score and your user experience. Therefore, it’s important to minimize layout shifts as much as possible. Here are some best practices to minimize layout shifts:

• Reserve space for images and videos so they don’t push other elements around when they load.
• Avoid adding or moving elements on the page without warning or user action.
• Use fonts that load quickly or match the default fonts.
• Avoid animating elements using properties that trigger layout changes.

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve shared the best practices to make your website load fast, respond instantly to user actions, and stay stable and smooth during loading.

But don’t just take our word for it. See how your website performs with Eye10, the ultimate page speed tool that uses Google PageSpeed Insights data to show you your Core Web Vitals scores. Not only that, but Eye10 also gives you smart tips on how to improve your scores and make your website even more amazing. Try Eye10 and boost your SEO performance!