How To Measure Core Web Vitals For Your Website (And Tips To Improve It)

Google has already announced that Core Web Vitals metrics will be a crucial part of their upcoming algorithm update in May 2021. It will be mainly focused on the page experience of your website.

Google always wants to rank the best high-quality and relevant pages on the top page of their search results that’s why they keep bringing new updates and changes to their algorithm.

In this article, we will be talking about how you can measure the Core Web Vitals Metrics of your website and we will also share the important tips to improve it.

So make sure you read this article to the very end and get the most out of it by implementing these tips on your website. 

So What Exactly Is Core Web Vitals?

As you know all the elements of your web page like Titles, images, videos, buttons, etc, load at a separate specific time and contribute to the overall loading time of your page, visitors nowadays are impatient and your website page speed plays an important role in keeping them stick to your website.

Core Web Vitals are the set of three metrics that can help you achieve your website page’s speed and performance.

These three Core Web Vitals metrics are:

1. Largest Contentful Paint(LCP) simply means the Performance of your page. LCP measures the performance of your page considering the largest content of the page (like videos, images, etc) and checks their loading time. According to Google, you must keep your site LCP under 2.5 seconds for 75% of your page loads.
2. First Input Delay(FID)  means Responsiveness or Interactivity of your page. In simple words when a visitor clicks on something on your page, it should respond immediately and smoothly which shows how reliable your website is to the visitor. For this Google has suggested keeping your website FID under 100 milliseconds for 75% of page loads.
3. Cumulative Layout Shift(CLS) is called Visual Stability of your website and its pages, every element of your page should be properly aligned and optimized visually. Little visual errors on the page can negatively impact the mind of the visitor for your website and result in a bad first impression. Google recommends a CLS score of 0.1 or less.

How To Measure Core Web Vitals Metrics

To simply measure your current Core Web Vitals metrics you can install this chrome web vital extension giving you real-time updates of your page core web vitals metrics. We highly recommend you install this extension and be updated with page metrics.

Apart from this for better report and auditing of core web vitals metrics, you can use Google Seach Console or web.dev tools. These two tools will provide you with the full report of Core Web Vitals Metrics issues of your website. 

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So now that you have understood the concept behind the Core Web Vitals and how you can measure it effectively for your website.

Now let us look at the important tips on how you can implement Core Web Vitals metrics on your website pages effectively.

Tips To Improve Core Web Vitals Metrics (Step By Step Guide)

Step 1: Go to Google Search Console or web.dev/measure

tool and click on the option of Core Web Vitals, after clicking on it, it will start analyzing your website critical issues related to Core Web Vitals and give you a full report of the errors that you need to fix that will improve your website pages performance and speed.

Step 2: Click on Open Report and note down the most important critical(poor) issues first and start working on fixing those errors with your team by assigning the issues to the team members according to their skills and expertise.

Step 3: In this step, we will share with you the most critical issues that can hurt the website performance and how you and your team can fix these issues effectively to improve your Core Web Vital metrics.

1. Start with Image Optimization: Images take the longest time to load and result in a delay for the overall page loading speed, so it is very important to optimize your images with the right size and format.

• Use WebP format images for faster loading.
• Identify incorrect size images using the Lighthouse tool by Google Chrome.
• Use Cloud Convert to convert your images in WebP format. 
• Use tools like Google Analytics data or Screensiz.es to figure out the display sizes commonly used by the users.

2. Optimize CSS: Making CSS optimization is very important for you to eliminate all the critical errors related to styles, positioning, colors, etc must be fixed using optimized CSS code.

• According to Google, preloading your CSS as a strategy will force the browser to load the CSS when it is ready and needed which will improve the speed of the page.
• Only execute specific CSS elements that are necessary.
• Optimizing CSS will improve your website page’s performance and speed.

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3. Optimize Javascripts: Unoptimized Javascripts can highly delay the loading time of your website.

• Before loading the page, the browser has to process through Javascript.
• It is advisable for you to review, consolidate, minimize, optimize and strip as much Javascripts from your website to improve the loading time of your website pages.

4. Optimize your Videos: Videos are really helpful to deliver the message in a meaningful way which provides users important information but uploading and publishing a video on your website page without correctly optimizing can lead to lower website speed.

• Optimize your video as much as possible.
• The best way to optimize your video is by using an image placeholder where the video would normally load, this will allow the video to only load when the user clicks on it.

5. Icons and Fonts Optimization: Yes you have read it correctly, Icons and Fonts are actually heavy than you think and delay the page response time.

• Use a limited amount of fonts
• It is advisable to use a preload command to load the font earlier than necessary will help to improve the page speed.
• Instead of using usual icons, it is better to use SVGs(Scalable Vector Graphics) which will tremendously improve the loading speed.

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6. Must Implement Lazy Loading: For effectively improving page speed you must use the Lazy Loading technique which is now a common technique to use to increase the page speed.

• Implementing lazy loading will help you improve the core web vitals metrics..
• Earlier this year WordPress added native default lazy loading in its version 5.5
• It is advisable to use lazy loading on both videos and images to improve the page speed.

7. Server Optimization: None of the above tips will be effective if your server is low, make sure you switch to a faster and reliable server from time to time.

• Switch to a faster web hosting service.
• New web hostings providers are coming with advanced technology and improvements.
• Make sure your server is fast and if it is not, it is better to upgrade to a faster server now.

8. Reduce Third-Party Scripts: The third-party scripts take extra time to execute and load and can cause lower website performance and speed.

• Some plugins take extra time to load so it is advisable to always use the updated version of it for the quick load.
• Third-party comment sections, social sharing buttons, and media embed need to execute third-party scripts to load.
• Minimize third-party scripts as much as possible to ensure your website performs well in search engines.

Step 4: After successfully fixing all the major critical issues related to Core Web Vitals on your website, make sure to do a site audit again for core web vitals on Google Search Console or Chrome Lighthouse to check your website current performance, responsiveness, and visual stability, also keep fixing the errors as possible as you can.

Step 5: Sometimes even fixing so many errors, you will find your site performance low, it happens in rare cases. For this, we will advise you to redesign your website keeping in mind the Core Web Vitals Metrics tips we discussed above.

Conclusion

As we said at the beginning of the article that Core Web Vitals Metrics are mainly focused on the Page Experience of your website, Google introducing it in their algorithm is totally relevant and important because we all want our websites to perform and rank well on search results, so you should make sure to fix all the errors related to Core Web Vitals and keep providing value to your visitors with great page experience. 

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