Google is always changing, and to stay ahead of the competition, you need to make sure your website is optimized for its Core Web Vitals. This guide will show you how to do just that! We’ll go over each of Google’s Core Web Vitals and explain how you can optimize your site for them. By following these tips, you’ll be sure to rank higher in search results and attract more visitors to your website.
What are Core Web Vitals?
Google’s Core Web Vitals are a set of page experience metrics related to page speed, responsiveness, and visual stability. They’re designed to give you an idea of how your website performs from the user’s perspective.
The three Core Web Vitals are:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how long it takes for the main content on a page to load. You want your LCP to be as fast as possible, ideally under two seconds.
First Input Delay (FID) measures how long it takes for a page to become interactive. You want your FID to be as fast as possible, ideally under 100 milliseconds.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures how much content on a page shifts around while it’s loading. You want your CLS to be as low as possible, ideally under 0.25.
Why Core Web Vitals?
Google’s Core Web Vitals are essential because they’re directly related to the user experience. A website that loads quickly and is easy to use will give visitors a better experience than a site that takes forever to load or is difficult to navigate.
And as we all know, Google wants its users to have the best possible experience. They’re using Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor in their search algorithm.
What affects Core Web Vitals?
There are a few factors that can affect your Core Web Vitals. Here are some of the most common:
- Server response time: this is the time it takes for your server to receive and process a request from a user’s browser. The faster your server responds, the faster your page will load.
- Rendering time: this is the time it takes for your browser to render the HTML and CSS on a page. The faster your browser renders a page, the sooner visitors see it.
But before we dig any deeper into Core Web Vitals SEO, let’s review Google’s key ranking factors to understand better.
What are Google’s Key Ranking Factors?
Google’s key ranking factors are guidelines that the search engine uses to rank websites in its search results.
There are four key ranking factors to examine before you start to assess performance:
HTTPS: your site must establish a secure connection between the user’s browser and the webserver.
Mobile-friendliness: your site must work well on a mobile device. Is your site usable on small-screen devices? Does it render without content overflows? Is the text large enough? Are clickable areas course enough for touch control?
No interstitials: you should avoid intrusive interstitials which require an unreasonable amount of screen space. Is your content always readable? Does an interstitial partially obscure it?
Safe browsing: your site must not host malicious content or be involved in deceptive advertising practices.
By ensuring that your website meets these criteria, you can improve your chances of ranking higher in Google’s search results.
But to optimize your website further, you should also take Google’s signals for page experience, including core web vitals.
What are Google’s Signals for Page Experience?
Google’s signals for page experience include factors that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page.
The idea behind page experience is to make your website the best it can be for users.
Page experience signals include:
Mobile-friendliness: is your site usable on small-screen devices? Does it render without content overflows? Is the text large enough? Are clickable areas course enough for touch control?.
Safe browsing: is your site free of malware and deceptive advertising?
HTTPS: does your site use a secure connection?
No interstitials: are there any intrusive interstitials that obscure your content?
Loading performance: how fast does your page load?
Interactivity: how quickly does your page become interactive?
Visual stability: how stable is the content on your page? Does it shift around as it’s loading?
The last three items in the list make up Google’s Core Web Vitals, reflecting loading time, interactivity, and visual stability.
These signals are necessary because they help Google understand how users perceive the experience of interacting with your website.
Let’s take a deep look into each signal to see how they affect user experience and SEO.
As we mentioned earlier, mobile-friendliness is a key ranking factor for SEO.
It’s also one of the page experience signals because it affects how users perceive the experience of interacting with your website on a mobile device.
To make your ecommerce website mobile-friendly, you should choose a theme that supports responsive design. Each element on the page automatically adapts to a user’s screen—no matter what device they’re using.
Responsive design is crucial because it ensures that your content is always readable and accessible on any device. It also helps to avoid content overflows, which can be frustrating for users trying to view your site on a small screen.
In addition, responsive design can help improve your website’s loading performance because it eliminates the need to send different versions of your content to other devices.
Safe browsing is another page experience signal that measures how well your website protects users from malicious content and deceptive advertising practices. To make sure your site is safe for users, you should regularly scan your website for malware and remove any malicious code.
You should also avoid displaying any deceptive ads on your website. Deceptive ads trick users into clicking on them by imitating other elements on the page, such as buttons or links.
If you display these types of ads on your website, Google may penalize your site in its search rankings.
HTTPS is a security protocol that encrypts the connection between a user’s browser and your website. It helps protect users from having their data intercepted by third parties, such as hackers or ISPs. In addition, it also helps to improve your website’s loading performance because browsers can cache content that is served over an encrypted connection.
To add SSL/TLS encryption to your website, you must purchase an SSL certificate and install it on your web server.
If you’re using WordPress, a few plugins can help you add SSL/TLS encryption to your site without needing to purchase a certificate. One of these plugins is “Really Simple SSL,” available for free from the WordPress plugin repository.
Interstitials are forms of advertising that cover the content on your page and must be dismissed before users can access your content. These ads can be frustrating for users because they obscure the content they’re trying to view.
In addition, interstitials can also slow down your website’s loading performance because they need to be loaded along with your content.
To avoid displaying interstitials on your website, you should use an adblocker or disable them in your ad management settings.
You can also use a content delivery network (CDN) to quickly deliver your content to users located further away from your web server.
In addition, you should also make sure that any forms on your website are short and easy to fill out.
You can also improve the interactivity of your website by using a responsive design, which ensures that your content is always readable and accessible on any device.
The visual stability of your website is essential because it affects how users perceive the quality of your content. To improve the visual stability of your website, you should avoid using too much animation or moving content on your pages.
In addition, you should also make sure that any videos on your website are short and easy to view.
You can also improve the visual stability of your website by using a responsive design, which ensures that your content is always readable and accessible on any device.
To measure your site’s Core Web Vitals, you can use Google’s Page Speed Insights tool. This tool will analyze your website and provide you with a report that includes your website’s scores for each Core Web Vitals.
You can also use Google Search Console to see how your website performs on each of the Core Web Vitals. To do this, log into Search Console and click on the “Core Web Vitals” tab. This will show you a report that includes your website’s scores for each of the Core Web Vitals. There are a few other tools that you can use to measure your site’s Core Web Vitals, but these are the two that we recommend.
How to Prepare Your Website for the Core Web Vitals in 2022?
As we mentioned earlier, the best way to prepare your website for the Core Web Vitals is to optimize your site for page experience.
Here are a few tips that you can do to make sure that your site is prepared for the Core Web Vitals in 2022:
Image size and formats
Compress your images to reduce their file size. You can use a tool like TinyPNG to compress your images. You should also make sure that your images are in the correct format. The three most popular image formats are JPEG, PNG, and GIF.
It would be best to use JPEG for photos, PNG for graphics with transparent backgrounds, and GIF for animations.
Lazy loading is a technique that delays the loading of images until they’re needed. This can help improve your website’s performance because your pages don’t have to load all images at once.
You can use a plugin like Lazy Load by WP Rocket to lazy load images on your website.
You should use a third-party video hosting service like Vimeo, Wistia, or YouTube to host your videos. This will take the load off of your server and will also ensure that your videos are delivered in the correct format to each visitor.
You should also lazy load or defer your videos, so they’re not loaded until needed.
You should avoid using unnecessary tracking scripts on your website. If you must use tracking scripts, you should make sure that they’re only loaded on the appropriate pages and that they’re not impacting your website’s performance.
You can use a tool like GTM Snippets to create a custom tag for your tracking scripts. This will ensure that your tracking scripts are only loaded when needed.
You should use a maximum of eight custom font variants on your website. You can also improve the loading time of your fonts by preloading them and storing them locally.
Ads, Pop-ups, promo banners
You should avoid using too many ads, pop-ups, or promo banners on your website. Not only do these elements impact the performance of your website, but they can also be annoying to visitors.
If you must use these elements on your website, you should make sure that they’re appropriately sized and placed so that they don’t impact the visual stability of your pages.