How Can I Improve My Core Web Vitals?
There are plenty of ways to improve your Core Web Vitals; in other words, there are plenty of ways you can enhance your user experience. First, it is important to break down these Core Web Vitals into the 3 main metrics, as each of these will require different techniques for improving your scores. These are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
What Difference Does It Make? If you improve the Core Web Vitals, you are making a difference in your overall SEO efforts, which could improve your rankings.
What Affects Core Web Vitals? The speed, responsiveness, and visual stability all affect the Core Website Vitals scores. If your website is too slow to load, is not as responsive as Google or users want, or your pages shift for no reason, causing users to click the wrong thing, your scores are going to be lower than a website that does not face these issues.
Improve Your Core Web Vitals
How To Improve Core Web Vitals
To improve your Core Web Vitals, you must find out the scores you have for each metric. This enables you to best optimise your time. There’s no point in focusing on improving your LCP first if your FID is worse off. This being said, make sure to regularly check your scores to ensure that changes to the algorithm haven’t impacted even the good scores. Once you have scores for each metric, you can start putting in place strategies.
How To Improve Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Start by checking your image sizes and how responsive they are, then look at optimising and compressing them. All of these are very easy improvements to make. Other easy techniques include using a more reliable web hosting provider and decreasing file sizes by reducing the length of code. If you are prepared for harder levels of tasks, look at lazy loading, take the time to improve server response time, and implement caching. You could also use the Content Delivery Network (CDN) tool to help handle high traffic and balance the network, which could speed up the LCP score.
How To Improve First Input Delay (FID)
There is plenty to do if you want to improve your score to under 100 ms (to get a score of Good) or under 300 ms (if you are looking to improve from Poor). First, start by optimising your CSS code, then look at breaking up long JavaScript tasks that cause problems and delays. You should also consider the minification and compression of code, including comments, line breaks, and whitespace, and look at running code during more idle periods.
How To Improve Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
You want to aim for a score of under 0.1 to enjoy a “Good” status, and this is what you need to do to get closer to achieving this goal. Before anything else, understand where your shifts and CLS issues are occurring. Once you know this, start doing the following. Set width and height attributes on all images; then, take a look at the fallback elements, as some web fonts can cause issues. You could even use transitions to provide more context over layout shifts.