Are you ready to learn more about the latest updates in this SEO arena and see what Core Web Vitals means for web creators and users alike? If you’re a WordPress site owner, it’s time to sit up and take notes.

Understanding Core Web Vitals: The Basics

Google’s Core Web Vitals are the latest criteria the search engine giant uses to measure user experience on your website. Essentially, these vitals focus on three essential pillars:

1. Loading Performance (Largest Contentful Paint [LCP]): This determines how long it takes for the largest content element on your page to load. For example, let’s say you have a vibrant banner image on your homepage. If it takes too long to load, your LCP score may dip, potentially affecting your site’s ranking.
2. Interactivity (First Input Delay [FID]): This measures the time it takes for a user to interact with your site after landing on it. Recall when you clicked on or tapped a button, and it took ages to respond. That’s a high FID score you want to avoid.
3. Visual Stability (Cumulative Layout Shift [CLS]): This focuses on any unexpected layout shifts on your page. Picture reading a riveting article, and suddenly, an ad pops up, pushing the content downwards. Annoying, right? That’s a high CLS in action.

Over the years, Google has introduced exciting enhancements to the Core Web Vitals. For WordPress enthusiasts, the ripple effects of these changes are monumental.

Emphasis on Mobile Experience: The World’s on the Move

With the prevalence of smartphones and tablets, Google knows the importance of a great mobile experience. Hence, Core Web Vitals places importance on optimizing for mobile devices. Remember when you tried to click on a link on your phone, and the page layout suddenly shifted, making you click on an ad instead? With Google’s emphasis on mobile metrics, such experiences have been drastically reduced. It’s not just about looking good on a mobile screen; it’s about functioning seamlessly, too.

Incorporating Real-World User Experience Data

One of the significant shifts Google made to Core Web Vitals was the transition from lab data (controlled environment tests) to field data (real-world user experiences). By tapping into tools like the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX), website developers can now access real-world measurements, ensuring their optimizations genuinely benefit the end-user.

For instance, an eCommerce website, noticing a higher LCP, discovered that users in a particular region faced slower load times due to larger-than-average product images. This real-world insight allowed them to make the necessary adjustments, thus improving the shopping experience for users in that region.

Core Web Vitals and SEO: A Loving Marriage

As of 2021, Google made it official: Core Web Vitals became a ranking factor for search results. This integration underscores the weightage of user experience in the realm of SEO.

Websites optimized for a better user experience, adhering to Core Web Vitals guidelines, retained users, and favorably positioned in search results. Think of it as a restaurant: great ambiance and prompt service (user experience) can be just as crucial as the food (content) in getting repeat customers and recommendations.

WordPress & Core Web Vitals: Making the Connection

WordPress powers a significant chunk of the web, so its themes and plugins play a crucial role in these metrics. A poorly-coded theme or a heavy plugin can drastically affect your LCP. Similarly, intrusive ads or pop-ups can impact your CLS.

Anecdote: I once stumbled upon a beautifully designed WordPress site selling handmade crafts. However, whenever I tried selecting a product, a pop-up survey would appear, causing the page to shift. The result? I left without purchasing. This is a classic case of poor CLS affecting business.

Ideas for Improvement

Improving CLS on a WordPress website involves optimizing various elements to ensure smoother user interactions and page stability. Here are some recommendations:

1. Opt for lightweight themes and plugins: Choose themes and plugins that prioritize performance and adhere to best coding practices. This reduces the likelihood of elements causing layout shifts.
2. Minimize or eliminate intrusive elements: Evaluate the necessity of pop-ups, ads, or other elements that could disrupt the user experience. If they’re essential, consider implementing them in a non-intrusive manner or at least ensure they don’t cause sudden layout shifts.
3. Optimize images and media: Large images or videos can contribute to layout shifts as they load. Compress images, lazy-load media, and consider using responsive design techniques to prevent unexpected resizing.
4. Prioritize content loading: Load critical content and interactive elements first to minimize the impact of late-loading resources on layout stability. Utilize techniques like lazy-loading and asynchronous loading to achieve this.
5. Test and monitor: Regularly monitor your website’s performance using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse. Identify and address any CLS issues promptly to maintain a positive user experience.

Ultimately, optimizing CLS requires a combination of technical expertise and ongoing maintenance. Consider consulting with a web development or performance optimization expert to ensure your WordPress website delivers a smooth and stable browsing experience for users. You’ll want to work with someone who is intimately familiar with using Core Web Vitals to make a WordPress website Google-friendly.

Conclusion

In the vast ocean of the internet, ensuring your WordPress site is Google-friendly is like equipping it with a compass, ensuring it sails smoothly toward visibility and success. Remember, a satisfied visitor today could be a loyal customer tomorrow.

Google’s Core Web Vitals initiative has continually evolved to ensure the web remains user-friendly. By setting clear metrics, emphasizing mobile experience, incorporating real-world data, and integrating with SEO, Google has sent a clear message to web developers worldwide: the user is royalty.

But as technology and user needs evolve, how will Core Web Vitals adapt in the future? Will we see more metrics added, or will the focus shift entirely? One can only wonder, but one thing’s for certain: the journey of enhancing web experiences is far from over.

If you think the future of your WordPress website must include the incorporation of Core Web Vitals into your strategy for making your WordPress website Google-friendly, contact WebDevStudios. Our team is equipped to ensure your site passes all the metrics.

The post How Using Core Web Vitals Makes Your WordPress Website Google-Friendly appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Web Vitals

Don’t worry, as there is still time to get educated and roll out improvements, since Google is going to announce the official start date at least six months before these changes go into effect. Until then, let’s learn more about the new terminology and the associated acronyms.

A Web Vital is a metric, and each one carries a weighted score, with the Core Web Vitals weighing the most. All the Web Vitals create the page experience, which Google will use to sort their search results.

Largest Contentful Paint

Introduced in Lighthouse v6, the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric reports the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport. LCP considers the following page elements: <img>, <image> (inside SVGs), <video>,  <div> (with a background URL), and block-level elements containing text nodes, such as <p>.

To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading and is primarily affected by four factors:

1. Slow server response times
2. Render-blocking JavaScript and CSS
3. Resource load times
4. Client-side rendering

First Input Delay

The First Input Delay (FID) metric helps measure the user’s first impression of your site’s interactivity and responsiveness. Specifically, FID measures the time from when a user first interacts with a page element to when the site responds to the interaction.

Example: When the user clicks or taps on a button to the time when the browser is able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction.

To provide a good user experience, pages should have a FID of less than 100 milliseconds. Techniques for reducing the FID include:

1. Reduce the impact of third-party code
2. Reduce JavaScript execution time
3. Minimize main thread work
4. Keep request counts low and transfer sizes small

Note: FID is a metric that can only be measured in the field! It requires a real user to interact with your web page. Learn how to measure FID in the field.

Cumulative Layout Shift

The Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) metric was also introduced in Lighthouse v6 and measures visual stability. A layout shift occurs any time a visible element changes its position from one rendered frame to the next. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.

For most websites, Google says you can avoid all unexpected layout shifts by sticking to a few guiding principles:

1. Always include size attributes on your images and video elements, or otherwise reserve the required space with something like CSS aspect ratio boxes.
2. Never insert content above existing content, except in response to a user interaction.
3. Prefer transform animations to animations of properties that trigger layout changes.

Quality content is still paramount.

Even though quality content isn’t listed on the chart above, it’s important to note that it’s still one of the most important factors when it comes to search results rankings.

Per Google:

A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content. However, in cases where there are multiple pages that have similar content, page experience becomes much more important for visibility in Search.

In other words, the Page Experience becomes the tiebreaker when websites have similar content. To visualize what a tiebreaker might look like, take a peek at the difference between Axios and Mediate:

Both feature a story about Jonathan Swan’s interview with President Trump. Which one of these two web pages do you think provides a better user experience? Based on Google’s new web vitals, Axios should win the tiebreaker. It provides a better user experience.

Measuring Web Vitals

When it comes to measuring Web Vitals, site owners can use a variety of Google’s own tools to gather and review data such as:

• Search Console
• PageSpeed Insights
• Web Vitals Chrome Extension
• Chrome UX report
• Lighthouse via Chrome DevTools

These tools are great, but take a look at the screenshot below. There’s not enough data for my personal blog:

Bummer, but not a surprise since the general public isn’t going measure the speed of my website (or yours). Furthermore, you cannot use these tools to measure FID, since that metric requires a real person. So how can you gather data to accurately measure Core Web Vitals?

web-vitals JavaScript Library

To help measure Core Web Vitals, Google has created a small production ready JavaScript library, named web-vitals and it’s available on NPM (or via CDN like UNPKG). web-vitals works in Chromium based browsers, such as Chrome, Edge, Brave, etc. Some methods like getFID() work in Firefox and Safari, but require a polyfill. The library supports all of the Core Web Vitals, as well the other Web Vitals that can be measured in the field:

Core Web Vitals

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
• First Input Delay (FID)
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Other Web Vitals

• First Contentful Paint (FCP)
• Time to First Byte (TTFB)

The web-vitals library can even send the results to Google Analytics, so you can graph the data with a visualization tool like Data Studio.

Testing with the web-vitals JavaScript Library

My personal blog leverages @wordpress/scripts to import and bundle NPM packages (learn more). Let’s install web-vitals and see what happens.

First, bring the library into my theme:

npm i web-vitals

Next, I’ll place this code into my entry file, index.js:

import {getCLS, getFID, getLCP} from 'web-vitals';

getCLS(console.log);
getLCP(console.log);
getFID(console.log);

Now, I’ll bundle it up with @wordpress/scripts:

npm run build

Finally, I’ll open my blog on my local (using a Chrome-based browser) and open the console:

Data! According to web-vitals, the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is the photo of my fam jam. This is great! I know exactly what to focus on to improve my LCP score.

To view Content Layout Shifts (CLS), or view metrics that change as you interact with a page, you’d need to pass a true parameter to both the getCLS() and getLCP() methods:

import {getCLS, getFID, getLCP} from 'web-vitals';

getCLS(console.log, true);
getLCP(console.log, true);
getFID(console.log); // Does not accept a `true` parameter.

Now we can see updated data coming in, as I interact with the page:

If you’d like to play around, I put together a Github repo which includes the example above in a child-theme for Twenty Twenty.

10 Tips to Help Enhance Your Page Experience

Th example above just scratches the surface on testing for Core Web Vitals. Here are 10 tips to help you improve your Core Web Vitals score, which will enhance the user experience on your web pages.

1. Optimize images with reSmush.it, Smush, or Imagify
2. Use properly sized images for their respective containers (and set height and width attributes)
3. Lazy-load images, videos, and iframes
4. Minify HTML, CSS, JS and optimize fonts
5. DNS prefetching and preconnect, with preloading
6. Reduce heavy JavaScript payloads
7. Defer non-critical CSS and rendering blocking JavaScript
8. Preload your page cache and push to a CDN
9. Reduce advertisement layout-shift by statically reserving space for the ad slot
10. Use the web-vitals JavaScript library to help gather field data, then make adjustments as needed

Google offers some really great advice (and examples) for optimizing LCP, FID, and CLS respectively. You can also learn more about caching WordPress in my interview with WP Rocket.

Wrap Up

Google rewards site owners and publishers for having fast web pages, and the Core Web Vitals are new way to measure the way users experience those web pages. Hopefully this change will force encourage site owners to focus on their web page experiences.

To learn more, view the official announcement and get get all the technical details from Google. It’s also worth a look to read about SEO implications.

The post Core Web Vitals appeared first on WebDevStudios.