Core Web Vitals: What They Are & How to Improve Them

Core Web Vitals – this term has become popular for being connected with your web performance.

This phrase is used for a set of specific website performance factors or metrics that are essential to user experience. 

Would you like to know which metrics are these? Certainly, it’s necessary for every search engine optimization expert or digital marketer to discover what these vitals are. Let’s get started to exactly know what these are. 

As aforementioned, Core Web Vitals are web performance determinants. While designing the website, developers together with certified search engine optimization experts sit together to discuss these metrics. It is simply because the eventual goal of any web presence is to appear on SERPs, rank in top 10 searches, and deliver excellent user experience.  This is why it’s good if you know what these determinants are. To name, here they are: 

• Loading Speed

• Interactivity 

• Visual Stability 

Importance of Core Vitals

The digital experience is everything if you are there on the internet.  Users stay happy if they click the link, and it opens up at a lightning-fast speed. This experience boosts them to explore and find answers to want they look for. 

On the flip side, slow loading speed does not seem convincing to users that keep waiting for the website to open for exploring. If somehow it opens, the complex and inactive navigation fails to retain them. Consequently, they bounce out of the website. 

And if there are some more technical errors, the website becomes good for nothing. It is simply because visitors don’t like exploring it. For this reason, it became the need of the hour to introduce Core Web Vitals (CWV). 

It won’t be incorrect if we say that CWV are officially the web ranking signals. If these signals show ‘good’, website owners and developers can find every reason to celebrate. This result means that their websites are fast, responsive, and easy to use, which are, ultimately, making customers happy. Increased engagement rate, conversions, and overall improvement in web performance—these all point toward the fact that their CWV are good in terms of user experience. 

Let’s get a little deep into these three significant vitals. 

CWV 1. Loading Speed (Largest Contentful Paint or LCP)

Technically called the Largest Contentful Paint, the loading speed refers to how long it has been to load the website completely. Simply put, it refers to the time span from the moment a user clicks on a link to the moment he/ she sees the content on-screen. (Avoid confusing it with other PageSpeed metrics, like First Contextual Paint.)

LCP is opposite to these metrics. It is mainly concerned with whatever impacts the speed of the web experience or web speed optimization, which includes the ability to see and interact with. 

However, it does not mean that Google PageSpeed Insights are insignificant. They are actually helpful to discover problematic areas. These insights can enable you to find those downsides where refining is required. 

There is also another reason, which is connected with the real-life performance. Google Chrome browser data show it all from your website, but not of only a single web page. 

In short, you can have a list of URLs that are “good”, “need improvement”, and “poor” in performance as per guidelines. Simply say, your web page should hit the LCP within 2.5 seconds if you really want to keep the bounce rate low. 

If it doesn’t, there could be multiple reasons that can be any of these: 

• Unnecessary third-party scripts, which can hamper the website speed by 34 ms.  

• Inefficient hosting, which hampers the overall loading time.  

• Absence of lazy loading function, which activates the loading of images on a long page when scrolled down. 

• Large page elements, which often hamper the web pages’ LCP. 

• Complex and long CSS codes, which should be minified to quicken LCP times. 

CWV 2. Interactivity (First Input Delay or FID)

As this name suggests itself, interactivity is all about how users interact or communicate with your web pages. 

To discover, there are a few signals that can signal this interaction. These signals can be exploring menus, clicking a link in the navigation, entering email into a form field, and opening accordion text, etc. 

FID helps you discover how long it takes to complete an action on a page. There can be a case wherein users only scroll down or up or zoom in or out to read the content (as on news or articles-based websites). 

There are certain points that can help you better your website’s FID scores. Here are a few common points that can make it up and better:  

• Use minimal JavaScript because it takes too much time to interact and render JS. 

• Avoid integrating non-critical third-party scripts like Google Analytics, heatmaps, etc. 

• Prefer a browser cache, which helps in increasing the page loading speed. 

• You must take into account that the slow FID times are likely to bitter user experience, which leads to a poor user experience. 

CWV 3. Visual Stability (Cumulative Layout Shift or CLS)

Visual stability, here, refers to how stable a website's layout is when a user interacts with it. You can check how stable a web page is as it loads. If it happens smoothly, its CLS is high. 

This is certainly connected with user experience again. It should ensure that the visitors are smoothly getting to links, images, and fields when it’s fully loaded. The struggle is real that visitors face when they see the site loading and elements are shifting up or down. This smooth sailing automatically prevents accidental clicking on a wrong link or button. 

 

With these simple tips, you can keep your CLS score high. 

• Prefer standard size or dimensions for any video, images, GIFs, and infographics, etc. because it won’t change the layout when the page is completely loaded. 

• Avoid shifting ads elements here and there. Reserve a specific place for them to avoid the transitioning of content up or down. 

• Choose below the fold location to insert new UI elements.

Here in the nutshell, you can follow these tips to fully optimize your web page speed, interactivity, and visual stability.  

Optimizing Core Web Vitals in Nutshell

To optimize Core Web Vitals, website owners and developers need to focus on improving loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. These all have a significant role in online sales optimization, which is about increasing conversions, and hence, revenue.  

There are a number of strategies that can be used to improve each of these metrics:

a. Loading Speed

To improve loading speed, website owners and developers can take a number of steps, including:

• Optimizing images and videos to reduce their file size

• Reducing the number of HTTP requests a website makes

• Enabling caching to reduce the amount of data that needs to be downloaded on subsequent visits

• Using a content delivery network (CDN) to improve the speed at which content is delivered to users.

b. Interactivity

To improve interactivity, website owners and developers can take a number of steps, including:

• Minimize render-blocking resources

• Optimize server response times

• Optimize images and videos for size and compression

• Use a content delivery network (CDN) to reduce latency

• Prioritize visible content loading over non-visible content

c. Visual Stability 

Here is a roundup of points that can help in optimizing CLS of your website. 

• Preload web fonts

• Use set sizes for images and videos

• Reserve space for ads and other dynamic content

• Avoid inserting new content above existing content

• Avoid animations and transitions that can cause layout shifts

Conclusion

It's worth noting that there are many other factors that can impact these metrics, and the best approach will depend on the specific needs and goals of your website. Regularly monitoring your site's performance and conducting tests using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, or WebPageTest can help you identify areas for improvement and optimize your site for the best user experience.