Core Web Vitals Explained: Making Your Website Faster and More User-Friendly

Google, the world’s leading search engine, wants every website to give users a smooth experience.

To help measure this, Google introduced something called Core Web Vitals.

These are important factors that determine a website’s speed, responsiveness, and stability.

These factors aim to measure every website similarly, thus giving a fair benchmark for every site that is then factored into how your site ranks.

It should be noted that whilst many SEOs swear by these scores, and some site owners obsess over them, a fast site is no substitute for great content.

To this end, slower sites with better content generally outrank faster sites with poor content.

SEO is a competitive business, and often, Core Web Vitals is the first thing that a rival SEO company uses to suggest that another SEO agency isn’t doing a great job. Be wary of this, as Core Web Vitals are only one small piece of the SEO puzzle.

What are Core Web Vitals?

At their core, Core Web Vitals are three simple metrics that measure how user-friendly a website is.

There are three main ways to access your Core Web Vitals. You can use Google Search Console, Lighthouse in Chrome (more information below) or install the Site Kit WordPress plugin to connect your site to Google.

Note that each test will give you different results, which does not help when you are trying to improve your website, but they will all give you some idea about issues that need to be addressed.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the three main elements of Core Web Vitals:

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – This sounds complicated, but it simply means how long it takes for a page’s biggest bit of content (like a large image or block of text) to load. A fast website should show this content within 2.5 seconds or less.
2. First Input Delay (FID) measures how quickly a website responds when you first try to interact with it. For example, how long does it take before something happens if you click a button or link? A good website responds in under 100 milliseconds.
3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – Have you ever tried to click on something on a page, and everything shifts just as you’re about to click? That’s what CLS measures – how much things move around as the page loads. A website with a good score keeps things stable and doesn’t shift much.

You will also get scores for other aspects of your site, such as accessibility and SEO—these, too, should be noted and addressed if they are low.

Why Are Core Web Vitals Important?

Google uses these three measurements to decide how user-friendly a website is, and it now takes these into account when ranking websites in search results.

If your website is fast, responsive, and stable, Google is more likely to rank it higher, providing it has great content.

But it’s not just about pleasing Google – improving these factors makes your website easier to use and encourages people to stay on your site longer – another ranking factor.

When people visit a site that loads quickly and responds instantly, they’re more likely to stick around, browse, and convert (whatever that means to you).

How to Check Your Website’s Core Web Vitals

You don’t need to be a tech expert to determine how your website is doing. Google provides free tools to help you check these metrics:

• Google Search Console: This tool reports on your website’s performance and highlights areas for improvement.
• PageSpeed Insights: This tool shows you a detailed breakdown of your website’s speed and other performance measures, along with suggestions for improvement.
• Lighthouse: A feature in Google Chrome that lets you check how your website performs across various metrics, including Core Web Vitals.
• Site Kit plugin: This Google WordPress plugin brings Search Console and Google Analytics straight into your WordPress dashboard.

If your technical skills are up to it, Lighthouse is probably the best option, but if you want a less technical approach, use the plugin or Page Speed Insights.

When you run these tools, you will get results and an overall score for various aspects of your site.

Ideally, you want each of these to be north of 90/100, but getting to this score can be challenging.

How to Improve Core Web Vitals

If your website isn’t performing well on these metrics, some easy wins can improve your site’s scores.

There are several ways to improve them, and here’s a basic outline of where to get started:

1. To improve LCP (how quickly your content loads):
   • Compress and resize your images so they load faster.
     • This is often done using a plugin to compress the images you have already uploaded so they are smaller on the front end of your site.
   • Remove any unnecessary code that’s slowing down your website.
     • It’s easy to say but not so easy to do: your theme code is the bones of your site, and if your theme uses too much code, it could mean you need to switch to a lighter theme (not without its complications).
   • Only load videos and large images when needed (lazy loading).
     • A plugin like WP Rocket can take care of this for you, but only if the offending images or videos load outside the viewport – if you have a video in your header, you will need to look at other options.
2. To improve FID (how quickly your website responds):
   • Simplify the code that runs your website to react faster to user interactions.
     • Again, this is beyond the reach of most website owners and requires a developer to sort it out, but if you go back to the developers who built the site in the first place, they should surely have done this when they built it.
   • Use modern techniques to break up longer tasks so the browser isn’t overwhelmed.
     • This is purposefully vague as it’s outside most business owners’ skill sets – it’s best to speak to the pros if you want this looked at.
3. To improve CLS (how stable your page layout is):
   • Reserve space for images or ads so they don’t suddenly appear and shift to other content.
     • It’s easy to say, but again, it’s something else that requires a developer’s input to do correctly.
   • Avoid adding new content to the top of the page as it loads.
     • A slow server can cause this, but it’s another issue that a developer should examine.

Final Thoughts

Core Web Vitals may sound technical, but they’re really just a way to measure how good a website feels to users.

That said, getting your site scores as high as possible can take time, and if you are not sure about what you are doing, you could do more harm than good.

Investing in improving these metrics means making Google happier and ensuring a better experience for anyone visiting your website.

A faster, more stable website means people are more likely to stay on your site, engage with your content, and take the actions you want them to take.

Whether you’re running a personal blog or a business site, focusing on Core Web Vitals is a smart way to boost performance and user satisfaction.

A key point to remember here is that a fast site is no substitute for crap content, in order for your site to be successful you need both, so it can often be a balance between what you invest in improving your Core Web Vitals and what you invest in improving your sites content and writing new content.

David Foreman

Dave is an experienced WordPress developer and SEO expert. He's works on 100s of WordPress sites and has been developing and optimising websites for over 25 years.