A Comprehensive Guide to Google Core Web Vitals

Google core web vitals are one of the latest topics in the world of SEO ranking. As a website owner, you might be continuously seeking an answer to how to improve your website with core web vitals, and we’re here to help you with the same. Improving or enhancing the ranking of your website on Google is an ongoing battle that has no end. This ranking process becomes even more challenging with the ever-changing criteria and algorithm updates of Google. All the updates introduced by Google are solely for the purpose of helping the users to find better answers for their queries, but they can be pretty hard to keep up with.

So, if you are new to the term Google Core Web Vitals and want to know core web vitals seo best practices, then this article has got you covered with a complete guide to Google Core Web Vitals and their best usage practices.

Let’s start with an introduction of Google Core Web Vitals first!

What Are Google Core Web Vitals?

Google Core Web vitals are simply the elements of a website that affects the user experience directly. In other words, we can say that Core Web Vitals involves all those aspects that Google finds crucial in the entire user experience of a particular web page. These metrics will eventually become an essential part of the ranking algorithms of Google.

According to Google, all its Core Web Vitals represent a set of metrics that are entirely related to the page’s speed, page visual stability, and page responsiveness. The Google Core Web Vitals generally involves the three primary metrics that are as follows:

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The LCP measures the loading performance of the website, i.e., how long the largest item in the viewport takes to load completely. In order to offer an excellent user experience, the LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the first page starts loading. 
  • First Input Delay (FID): It measures the interactivity, i.e., how long it takes for the website to respond when a user clicks somewhere on the website. To offer a good user expeir4nce, the pages must have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): The CLS measures the visual stability of the website, i.e., whether the page jumps around as the user scrolls through the web content or not. To offer a good user experience, the pages must always have CLS less than 0.1.

6 Best Practices to Use Google Core Web Vitals

Here are the best practices relating to how to improve your website with Core Web Vitals!

  1. Make Sure Critical Page Templates Are Mobile Friendly 

In 2016, mobile traffic overtook desktop traffic rapidly, and since then, it has become essential to make sure that your website is 100% mobile friendly and is well optimized for mobile devices. The usability and the layout of a website on a mobile device can break or make the user experience. So, for better site performance, the users must be able to see the crucial content in an accessible and clear way without having to zoom in. You must, therefore, always make sure that the critical page templates are mobile-friendly.

  • Implement Lazy loading

If you have images displayed on your website, then it is vital for you to implement lazy loading. By implementing lazy loading, the core web vitals score and the UX of your website will not get harmed. Lazy loading allows the images to load at the exact moment when the user scrolls down through the entire page. All this is done without compromising the website’s loading speed and will allow you to achieve a perfect LCP score.

  • Always Audit Your Website For Security Issues

One of the essential core web vitals seo best practices is to audit your website for security issues. Apart from the loading sped and mobile usability, the security of your website also plays a vital role in determining the web page experience. Google is always keen to ensure that the websites presented in search engine results pages are secure to browse without any risk to user security and privacy. So, it is always suggested to audit your website for security issues.

  • Reduce JavaScript Execution

If you have a website with a poor FID score, then it is sure that your webpage interacts with users in over 300 milliseconds. So, in order to tackle this problem, you must consider reducing and optimizing the JS execution. It will reduce the time between your page and browser execution JS code. Apart from this, it is always recommended to use as little memory as possible because whenever the code of your site requests the browser, it reserves a new memory therein that might stop JavaScript and slow down the web page further. So, you must consider deferring the unused JS for better site performance.

  • Provide Appropriate Dimensions For Embeds And Images

Another core web vitals seo best practice in the list is to provide appropriate dimensions for embeds and images. The CLS’s score that is beyond 0.1 is regarded as poser, and it is caused by elements like ads, embeds, images without appropriate dimensions in the CSS file. So, if you want to enhance your CLS score, then dimensions do matter. Make sure to set proper dimensions for embeds and images because it will further help the browser to allocate the perfect amount of space in the page while the element is loading.

  • Optimize And Compress Images

Finally, optimizing and compressing images is the last practice that you can adopt as an answer to “how to improve your website with core web vitals.” For most websites, images are the largest elements. Therefore, it is essential to optimize them because it can otherwise make your web page heavy, thus affecting the load time. Always make sure to optimize the images perfectly so that your webpage can become lighter, which in turn will improve your website’s loading speed, UX, LCP score, and obviously your rankings in SERP.

The Bottom Line

This was all about how to improve your website with core web vitals seo best practices! We hope that now you have clearly understood what google core web vitals are and how you can improve your website performance by utilizing the metrics of the core web vitals. So, always make sure to follow the best practices in order to make your website full-feature-fledged when it comes to offering a flawless user experience in terms of loading times, page speed, page responsiveness, and user security.