The rising popularity of Shorts, Reels, and TikToks is evidence of our shrinking attention spans. Internet users today don’t have patience for slow and clunky sites. They won’t pay you any attention if your site takes several seconds to load the home page. Fortunately, you can improve your site’s performance for higher search engine ranking and more online visibility.
Google has Core Web Vitals to help website developers, SEO experts for hire and white label digital marketing company to improve the user experience (UX) on a website. When you improve the performance and UX on a site, it automatically upgrades your search engine ranking. So, what’s all the fuss about core web vitals?
What are Core Web Vitals (CWV)?
While Google introduced CWV in mid-2020, they officially became ranking factors one year later. When you outsource SEO to Indian companies, they focus on the three key elements that make up Core Web Vitals:
1. LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)
As the name suggests, this metric measures the time it takes for the largest content on your webpage to get completely rendered. This may be a hero image, the largest text box, or something else. Imagine opening a cooking website and you instantly see the large picture of the main dish. That’s a good LCP score.
2. FID (First Input Delay)
This metric measures the time it takes for the browser to respond to your or any user’s first interaction, be it scrolling, clicking a button, or something else. For instance, an apparel site with a good FID score would instantly show results as soon as you type in ‘shoes’ or ‘t-shirts’ in the search box.
3. CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)
This metric measures the layout shifts the elements on your webpage go through during loading. A low CLS score shows high visual stability where content doesn’t jump around the screen when the site loads up. For instance, if a shopping site has a high CLS score, the cart icon will jump around after you add an item to the bag.
Search engine optimization companies for small businesses focus on lowering all three metrics to make your website appealing to both users and search engine crawlers. Let’s check out how they do it.
Optimizing tips for each CWV:
1. LCP
| Tips | Description |
| Focus on critical resources | Identify the largest content element on each page and make sure that it’s coded to load first. This is usually content that sits above the fold, right before scrolling. |
| Use a browser caching plugin | Use plugins like WP-Optimize for browser caching to store resources of more frequented pages locally |
| Optimize server response time | Upgrade your hosting plan, switch to a more reliable hosting provider, or optimize server-side operations to reduce server response time. |
| Optimize images | Compress images without sacrificing quality with plugins like Smush. |
| Trim down render-blocking resources | Use WP-Optimize or other tools to compress large JS (JavaScript) files. |
2. FID
| Tips | Description |
| Cut down on third-party scripts | Outsource digital marketing services so that they can analyze your website with Google’s PageSpeed Insights and their experts can identify all the unnecessary scripts from the page. |
| Preload important resources | Preloading instructs the browser to prioritize resources that are important for interactivity. This can immensely boost your FID score. |
| Use a CDN | CDNs (Content Delivery Network) send videos and other types of heavy content to users from the closest server. And this improves the responsiveness of your site. |
3. CLS
| Tips | Description |
| Define dimensions | Set the height and width of all the elements to prevent resizing several times when the page loads. |
| Define aspect ratios | Define aspect ratios for videos, images, and other such content so that they provide a consistent user experience during loading. |
| Preload off-screen content | Preload resources that would appear later to the user to avoid random shifts in layout. |
| Don’t lazy load above-the-fold | Initial shifts can be prevented by not lazy loading content over the space that appears before scrolling. |
Slow and clunky websites don’t just lose visitors, they also create poor brand impressions and lower your position on the search results page. When you use the above-mentioned tactics to optimize LCP, FID, and CLS, it leads to a website that’s fast, responsive visually stable, and appealing. However, it often requires the expert touch of SEO professionals and experienced web developers.