Core Web Vitals: Importance of Page Speed and User Experience in SEO

Before the announcement of new Core Web Vitals metrics there were many controversies about page speed. Now this announcement has cleared them all. The advanced tools are quite effective in checking web page speed.

Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics are introduced so that the webmasters spend time in improving speed metrics that matters to the user.

Core Web Vitals

Google announced this important metric in May 2020. According to Google, Web Vitals is a unified metric that analyzes the speed signals required to deliver a great user experience on the web.

It is in the website owners’ hands to make sure that user experience metrics like core web vitals, mobile friendliness, safe browsing, HTTP security are considered to prevent any effect from future Google algorithm updates.

Core Web Vitals Metrics

Strive to understand what these metrics are trying to accomplish, as it may help in simplifying things for you. Core Web Vitals Metrics focuses on three characteristics of a page:

• Site speed
• Responsiveness (interactivity)
• Visual page stability

The Core Web Vitals Metrics, introduced by Google in May 2020, includes the three following thresholds:

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

It is the amount of time taken by a page’s primary content to load. LCP within 2.5 seconds or faster, is the best for your page.

2. First Input Delay (FID)

It represents the amount of time that a page takes to become interactive. The best value for pages is to have a FID of 100 millisecond or less.

3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

It measures the visual stability of a page. To provide a good user experience, the recommended CLS measurement is 0.1 or less.

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How to attain an ideal Web Vitals Score

It is beneficial to have a precise level of expertise in technical SEO to get the desired results. The optimization efforts like adding a cache plugin and optimizing the images, CSS and JavaScript are some easy fixes that can help to improve the server response time and reduce the overall resource size.

However, our research shows that we can’t be dependent on these easy fixes to achieve the perfect Core Web Vitals score. Because:

• Site performance will be improved and the server response time will speed up through cache plugins only when users revisit your site or peruse through various pages during the same session. This advantage will be of no use if the cache expires soon.
• When the sequence of responses for images, JavaScript, and CSS is delayed, it results in bad user experience. And it turns out in breaking the site.
• To run CMS, various plugins or apps are needed to optimize each resource, which makes the site slower.

It is hard to achieve a perfect Web Vitals score if the same web server aims to deliver primary and secondary resources. So, hosting platforms like WP-Engine and AWS could help a lot as they come ready with all the features that we’ve discussed above.

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Resource Optimization for Web Vitals

 Site’s user experience can be improved by using some Google recommended solutions.

1. Optimizing images for page speed

Using optimized images can help speed up a site as huge image files create the highest payload on browsers. Try using the following to achieve a perfect Web Vitals score:

• Image CDN
• WebP format
• LazyLoad

2. Optimizing Java and CSS

Several methods can be used to optimize Java and CSS:

• GZip compression
• Minifying resources
• Combine JavaScript and CSS
• Reduce render blocking
• Deliver CSS and JavaScript using CDN

3. Optimizing the Font

It is best if you make sure that your CDN can override the font rendering behavior, as it is a very important speed drainer. It improves the CLS and provides you a good Web Vitals score.

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4. Embed Codes

For most businesses, it is necessary to use images and videos on the site to showcase their products/services. To improve the performance in Lighthouse Google recommends a solution where you can lazy load images and videos.

5. AMP Pages

Make sure your server is fast and responsive because, a slow server has major effect on site performance.

For any queries or suggestions you may connect with us at aanchalnahar@appnwebtechnologies.com / info@appnwebtechnologies.com