Story Based Question
You’ve made some great improvements to your website, but you’ve heard that Core Web Vitals can make or break your SEO rankings. You check your website’s Core Web Vitals scores, and they’re not great. You know that optimizing for these metrics is key to improving your site’s performance and search rankings, but you’re unsure of where to start. What specific actions can you take to optimize for Core Web Vitals and make sure your website performs at its best?
Exact Answer
To optimize for Core Web Vitals, focus on improving Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) by optimizing images and server response time, reduce First Input Delay (FID) by minimizing JavaScript and improving interactivity, and lower Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) by ensuring stable layouts with fixed dimensions for media.
Explanation
Optimizing for Core Web Vitals means improving the factors that affect loading, interactivity, and visual stability. Here’s how to tackle each metric:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric is about how quickly the largest visible element on your page loads. To improve LCP:
- Optimize images: Compress images and use modern formats like WebP for better performance.
- Use lazy loading: Only load images and media that are visible on the screen initially.
- Improve server response time: Use faster hosting or a content delivery network (CDN) to reduce the time it takes to load your page.
- Minimize render-blocking resources: Ensure that your page doesn’t wait for unnecessary resources (like large CSS or JavaScript files) to load before displaying content.
- First Input Delay (FID): FID measures how long it takes for the website to react to user interaction. To improve FID:
- Reduce JavaScript execution time: Split your JavaScript into smaller, more manageable pieces and load them asynchronously.
- Minimize third-party scripts: Remove or defer non-essential third-party scripts that slow down the page’s response time.
- Optimize the critical rendering path: Prioritize essential content to load first, so the page becomes interactive as soon as possible.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): CLS measures how much your page layout shifts while loading. To improve CLS:
- Set dimensions for images, videos, and ads: Always specify the width and height for these elements so that the browser knows how much space to allocate, preventing layout shifts.
- Avoid dynamically injected content: If content is injected late (like pop-ups or ads), it can cause layout shifts. Ensure it’s handled properly or deferred.
- Use font-display: swap: This ensures text remains visible while web fonts are loading, preventing any jumps when the fonts are applied.
By focusing on these optimizations, you can improve the performance of your site, make it more user-friendly, and satisfy Google’s ranking criteria.
Example
Imagine you run a local bakery website. Here’s how you’d optimize for Core Web Vitals:
- LCP: Your homepage features large, high-quality images of your bakery’s cakes and pastries, but they take forever to load. To improve the LCP score, you compress the images using TinyPNG, change them to WebP format, and enable lazy loading for images below the fold (images that are not visible initially). Additionally, you move your website to a faster server and use a CDN to deliver content more quickly.
- FID: On your product page, when a customer clicks on a cake to view more details, there’s a noticeable delay. To improve FID, you identify that the large JavaScript file is delaying the interaction. You break it into smaller pieces and defer non-critical scripts until after the page is interactive.
- CLS: Customers on mobile devices have complained that images and text sometimes shift when they’re viewing the page, which causes frustration. You fix this by specifying width and height for all images and embedded videos on your homepage. You also ensure that any dynamically loaded ads don’t push content around unexpectedly.
After making these changes, you re-check your Core Web Vitals scores using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights. The results are much improved: your LCP is under 2.5 seconds, FID is under 100 milliseconds, and your CLS score is below 0.1. Your bakery’s website now loads faster, feels smoother, and performs better in search rankings, which ultimately leads to more customers ordering online.
By following these optimization steps, you ensure that your website provides a top-tier experience for your visitors and aligns with Google’s Core Web Vitals standards. This helps boost your SEO rankings and keeps customers happy.