Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics by Google to measure user experience on your website.
They measure loading, interactivity and visual stability. Getting good Core Web Vitals is recommended to improve search rankings and user experience.
Core Web Vitals are a large part of Google’s “Page Experience” signals.
These metrics essentially measure the quality of your site’s user experience in real-time.
Yes, you read that right…
Google measures your website’s Core Web Vitals every time someone visits your website.
That means they can see your site exactly how users experience it.
Crazy, right?
There are three main Core Web Vital metrics to focus on:
Here’s the good news:
Because Core Web Vitals are clear metrics with clear benchmarks, it’s easy to see how well your website stacks up.
That means you know what needs to be improved!
What Will I Learn?
Core Web Vitals are important because they are a Google ranking factor.
They directly impact the user experience and engagement that your site offers.
Google is serious about ensuring that all websites that rank in the search results provide an excellent experience for their users.
That’s why Google has placed a large emphasis on Core Web Vitals in recent years.
Prioritising these metrics can improve your site’s visibility and drive more traffic while also increasing user engagement.
Who doesn’t want that, right?
The easiest way to check your Core Web Vitals is in Google Search Console.
Login to Google Search Console and click the “Core Web Vitals” report on the left.
You will see the report for both your website’s Mobile and Desktop versions.
Google Search Console groups your URLs under 3 statuses:
Then, you can click on any of the reports to see exactly which URLs have issues. This makes it easy to find the URLs that need to be fixed and address them quickly.
Make sure you go through our full Page Experience Checklist, which provides more in-depth information on these reports.
How to improve Core Web Vitals step-by-step:
Use Google PageSpeed Insights to identify performance issues on your website.
It will give you a complete overview of the URL from a Core Web Vitals perspective and tell you which elements need to be fixed.
Check out our perfect Google PageSpeed score tutorial to learn more.
Compress every image on your site to reduce its file size without losing quality.
Make sure you choose the correct format, like:
It’s also important to serve images on your site in modern formats such as WebP.
Remove unnecessary spaces, comments and characters from your CSS and JavaScript files.
This helps reduce their size and ultimately load faster. Over time, your CSS and JavaScript files can become bloated.
Lazy loading is when you delay loading images and videos on a page until needed. For example, images won’t be loaded on a page until the user scrolls down to them.
This will reduce the page’s initial load time and save a ton of bandwidth on your server for users who don’t scroll to the bottom of the page.
Win-win.
Browser caching is now a standard in website speed optimisation.
What does it do?
Short Answer:
It stores a copy of your website in the user’s browser.
When users return to your website, they don’t need to load the entire website again because they already have most of it stored in their browser.
This will significantly improve load times for repeat visitors!
Third-party tracking scripts, such as Meta Ads, Google Analytics or MailChimp email tracking code, can bloat your website.
Each time a page is loaded, all these scripts get loaded on top of your website.
Too many tracking codes and third-party scripts can significantly impact your website page load speed.
Start by removing any non-essential scripts. Consider using a free tool like Google Tag Manager, which allows you to add only one script to your website.
Need more help?
Check out our complete Core Web Vitals tutorial to learn more.
You can also read our increase website speed guide to learn how to speed up your website load times (in just a few minutes).
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