What Are Core Web Vitals

Are you a website developer who is bothered about low search engine ranking? Core Web Vitals can be the reason behind your worry. So, Don't worry!! In this article, you will learn about Core Web Vitals, their importance and how to improve them.

In 2021, Google launched a complete set of Core web vitals and made it compulsory for every website to update itself accordingly to get a decent SEO ranking.

Let us move further and learn all about core web vitals in detail.

What Are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are measurements of how well your website performs; it all depends on the overall user experience, how long your website takes to load, the amount of time it takes to solve the questions for which users visited it etc.

Do you Know? Among the millions of websites running on the internet, only 4% manage to follow all the core web vitals; this ensures that if you follow it, there is a very high chance that your website will rank high on google. Now, you must be curious to know what all those criteria are.

Core Web Vitals are of Three Types–

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

This measures how much loading time it takes for all the content to appear on a web page when you enter it. It is the score of the loading time of the most significant images and videos.

It is considered good when the time is <= 2.5 seconds. It needs improvement when it is <= 4 seconds, and it is considered poor when the time required is >=4 seconds.

2. First Input Delay (FIP)

FIP measures the quickness of your website; it says how responsive and interactive it is. It is the time of execution of the action. For example, when you click a button, you buy something from the website etc.

It is considered good when the time is <=100 milliseconds. It needs improvement when it is <= 300 milliseconds, and it is considered poor when the time required is >=300 milliseconds.

3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Cumulative layout Shifts are the measure of summation of the total number of shifts in the layout. The layout means the change in frame of a website, for example, when you open the homepage of youtube and then click some video frame changes.

Overall, CLS keeps an eye on the visual stability of a website. The score depends on the number of layout shifts. A zero means no shifts in layouts.

 It is considered good when the time is <= 0.1 seconds. It needs improvement when it is <= 0.25 seconds, and it is considered poor when the time required is >=0.25 seconds.

Why Are They So Important?

Core Web Vitals are essential for some reasons, and those reasons are-

• Inbuilding core web vitals in your website helps you rank higher in search engine optimization and develops a better overall user experience.
• It increases security and develops safe browsing. If you observe, you will find that some websites are HTTP and some are HTTPS. This extra S stands for security, and Core strong values help with that.
• Another critical factor is that it makes your website mobile-friendly. More than 50% of internet users use the internet on mobile phones. This data makes it more critical to create mobile-friendliness in websites, and strong core values help with that.

Now, you know why it is essential to follow core web vitals. Let us move further and more closely read about its working.

How Do Core Vital Values Work

As we know about LCP, FIP, and CLS and how they work, all scores are considered reasonable and harmful. For measuring these three, there are some standard google tools. We will study this further in this article.  

There are two types of data lab and field data. And these tools, like Pagespeed sights, measure both, lab data is aggregate, and field data is more accurate, as it gives proper insights.

Let us know more about it; these are the following must-have tools to have in your system-

1. PageSpeed Insights

This tool is widely used as it is Google's tool and can be used for both mobile and desktop versions of websites.

You have to paste the URL of your website and click on the analysis button, and it will give you scores of three standard matrices: LCP, FIP, and CLS. You can even check individual pages of your website.

It will also give you a set of instructions to improve the working of your site.

2. Chrome User Experience Report

You can access this report via Google Search Console, which web developers and coders mainly use.

It gives valuable insights into the interaction of your viewers with the website, for reading the report, you have to go to the dashboard of Google Search Console and the experience section.

3. Chrome Extension for Core Web vitals

The Web Vital Chrome extension is a helpful tool for all web surfers; by this, you can check the performance of any website. You have to install the extension and open the website.

It is significantly used for knowing the speed and performance of websites, the report comes with a handful of suggestions to keep in mind, and it measures page load time, page size etc.

What are the Ways to Improve Core Web Vitals?

Here are the five most important ways which will help you out in improving the Core Web Vitals of your website –

1. Work on Website Images

Images are the biggest hurdle in the high loading speed of a website. The first thing you should do for the smooth working of your website is to optimize images, compress them, and go for standard dimensions of images.

There are several tools for this, including smush, Nitropack ( for lazy loading), ShortPixel etc.

2. Optimize Javascript

Javascript makes your webpage take time to load; It affects your FID scores. To remove this hindrance, you need to optimize Javascript by-

•  Minifying Javascript
•  Minimizing and Consolidating Javascript
• Loading Defer Javascript

There are tools like WP Rocket and Nitropack which will help you out optimizing javascript.

3. Optimize Fonts

Similarly to images, fonts also take a lot of loading time. To avoid this, ideally, one should use one 2-3 types of fonts.

Since Fonts are heavy, they do not allow quick shifts in layouts, which is why it is suggested to use less variety in fonts, remove the fonts which are not used and pre-load the fonts in the cache to avoid delay.

4. Optimize Cascading Style Sheets

CSS is another factor behind lacking loading speed. The main work of CSS is to decorate the website. 

It looks after the look of your website. Similarly, like fonts and images, it decreases the score of LCP.

You can optimize CSS in your website by-

• Minifying CSS
• Preload CSS
• Combine CSS files
• Critical Inline CSS

There are plugins like WP Rocket and Netropack to help you optimize CSS.

5. Choose an Efficient Server

Other than all the above, there is this vital way to improve Core Web Vitals, visit your web hosting provider, ask for an upgrade, and search if there exists some problem from that side. If it is so, change your web hosting plan.

Speed up your server, for doing this, use a content delivery network ( CDN). It decreases website time lag by decreasing the distance between the user and the server.

These were the ways to improve core web vitals for your site.

Conclusion

You are all aware of the importance of core web vitals and their importance now. Constantly keeping an eye on google's algorithm, and timely accessing your website will take you up high on SEO rankings.

So far, many researchers have found that Core Web Vitals plays a minor role in the field of SEO; since it was launched recently, this could be why you can expect a more robust implementation in the future.

Author: Amit Kumar Khare

Amit is a tech enthusiast and loves writing about it. He is a senior developer with good hands-on experience in digital marketing.