5 Super Fast Ways To Improve Core Web Vitals

Does your website take more than 3 seconds to load? Is your website struggling with a high bounce rate?

Then it requires immediate attention.

Google considers Core Web Vital as one of the ranking signals. It is introduced to measure and evaluate the user experience of a website. 

The core web vitals consist of three metrics:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) - This metric measures how fast the largest content (image, video, gif) loads to be displayed to the user.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) - This metric measures the movement in the layout that could cause users to lose focus and interest while consuming the content.
• First Input Delay (FID) - This metric calculates the time the browser takes to load the webpage to respond to a user's first interaction - clicking on a link or playing a video.

Ensuring all these three metrics are satisfied and at the perfect level provides a great user experience and improves the search engine's rank.

Here are the five ways to optimize your website’s loading speed and responsiveness to rank up high and deliver a great user experience:

1. Compress and Optimize the Image Size

High-quality images consume more space. When the image size is big, your loading time will increase. If the loading time increases, the user experience will be affected. 

So, keeping the image size as small as possible is best. Compress the image size.

If you have created your website using WordPress, you can use plugins like ShortPixel to compress the image size. If not, many online sites are available to compress image size.

However, you might have a doubt - does compression affect the quality of the image?

To some extent, yes, it will damage the quality, but only it will be visible while zooming in on the image. Moreover, use JPEG format for images and SVG format for logos and icons. It is even best if you can use WebP format.

You can optimize the image using the Content Delivery Network (CDN) to improve the loading speed. A CDN is a network of server farms geographically distributed throughout the world.

For example, if your main server is located in India, but the user is in Australia, in that case, your website information stored on CDN passes the data instantly pulling from a nearby server.

2. Optimize for Render Blocking

Render blocking affects the First Input Delay metrics. 

When a browser loads your website, it first checks the CSS - because it is responsible for the overall look and layout - and renders it, followed by Java Script and renders it, then HTML and renders it, etc. This is the process.

If the CSS and Javascript are big, it takes a lot of time to load and blocks the process by not allowing anything to run in the background. This would make the user wait a long time and get frustrated.

To save from this, you can remove the critical design or stuff and include it in the codes for faster loading. You can also use plugins to check the build and heavy Java and CSS files to remove them.

To find the scripts that are blocking the render, you can use the Google Pagespeed Insights tool.

3. Optimize Your Font Size

Font size can also affect the User experience and loading time. When the font is heavy, like images, it takes a lot of time to load. If you use different font styles and sizes, the loading time will increase and damage the website layout.

Here is an example of the layout damage - if a user is about to click on one of your interlinks, and because the fonts shift up if the user clicks on other links, it would affect the change in cumulative layout score and irritate the reader to continue proceeding with your website.

So, the best practice to remove such confusion is to use 1 or 2 font styles throughout your website. That to use only the globally used font style like times new roman, Ariel, Robot, Open Sans, etc.

Another way to obviate such hassle is to use preload fonts. 

Preload fonts are nothing but saving the optimized copy of your fonts stored in each cache so that it can be delivered fast.

4. Upgrade to a Fast Server and Hosting Provider

Servers impact the performance of your website. If a server responds to a user request at a faster rate, then it is no problem.

But, if the server takes too long to respond, it is time to upgrade your hosting plan or change your hosting provider. Initially, as a startup, a shared hosting platform might be enough.

But, once your business has grown, you need to shift to separate hosting. If you find that even changing the hosting plan doesn't improve the site speed, it is time to change the hosting provider.

There are several top hosting providers that offer high speed and high uptime. For instance, SiteGround offers a 99.99% uptime.

Here are some additional tips to improve server response time:

• Check the server response time (collect data).
• Review any plugins that are increasing the loading speed. Because a certain plugin comes in with additional weight for the page and can impact negatively. Leave only the necessary ones.
• Use CDN for your site.

5. Set Proper Dimension

One of the important metrics of the core web vitals is the Cumulative Layout shift. Imagine that you're scrolling through a website on your phone. 

You think that it is all set to engage with it. Now, you see a text which has a hyperlink that has grasped your interest, and you're about to click it.

When you click it, all of a sudden, the text disappears, and there is an image in the place of the text. All the time, while you were reading the content on the website, the website was loading an image.

In this scenario, don't you get irritated and frustrated? This is what the CLS measures. 

You must optimize the CLS to deliver a seamless user experience and improve ranking. To do that, you must give a proper dimension to the image, video, or graphic in the CSS. This is the reason for the instability of your website.

Check the image's or other media's proper width and height, and then enter the right size in the CSS file.

Conclusion

Core Web Vitals are one of the top crucial ranking signals of Google. It measures how a user interacts with the site and enjoys it. Missing any metrics can disrupt the entire website’s ranking and performance.

With the above given five tips, you can easily improve your core web vitals and reap benefits. Remember, there are plenty of small elements where you can work on and improve the vitals.

But, these five are the most vital and cover most aspects.