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Opitimise Core Web Vitals | Speed up your website or online store

Core Web Vitals Opitimisation _ Speed your website or online store

Core Web Vitals are the new benchmark for websites from Google. Optimising your website to the core web vitals standards ensures that you are doing everything you can to get your website ranked well in Search Engines like Google. Not only that, it ensures that your visitors and users are getting an optimal experience when using your website.

What are the Core Web Vitals?

The core web vitals are broken down in to the following 7 categories

– First Contentful Paint

– Time To Interactive

– First Input Delay

– Largest Contentful Paint

– Total Blocking Time

– Cumulative Layout Shift

– Speed Index

What do Core Web Vitals mean?

What is First Contentful Paint?

The first contentful paint is the time in which the first element of the page appears on the screen, whether it be text, an image or coloured background. This is an important metric because it tells you how long the user is having to wait to see your website content. You want to try and keep this to be as short as possible. If content begins to show something, even it is a loading screen, then users are more likely to wait than if they are looking at a white screen with nothing happening. These bounce backs to the search results page harm organic rankings.

What is Time To Interactive?

Time to interactive is the time it takes for the webpage to become usable. So essentially the time it takes for the user to be able to perform a simple command like clicking a link. This is extremely important because we want users to be able to access the content and features they need as quickly as possible.

What is First Input Delay?

The first input delay is the time it takes your website to respond to the interaction of a user. Say for example, a user clicks a link or they click to open another section. This needs to be responsive, people don’t like to wait for content to load mid-journey, especially once they have already waited for the site to load initially. Slow processes cannot always be helped but we can offer a nicer way of showing the process is happening at the very least.

What is Largest Contentful Paint?

Largest contentful paint is the time it takes to render the largest element in the viewport. This tends to be an image or video. This metric gives you a good idea of how long it takes for the user to see a finished page that looks the way you intended it to look. This tends to be linked to the speed index.

What is Total Blocking Time?

Total Blocking Time is the total amount of time between First Contentful Paint and Time to Interactive where the main thread was blocked preventing the user from being able to interact with the page. This happens when content and scripts are loaded inefficiently. An audit and some restructuring is generally required here to see an improvement.

What is Cumulative Layout Shift?

Cumulative layout shifts occur when content is loaded in to the website. It’s happened to all of us, we go to click the link we want and then a banner or part of the header pops in and we end up clicking on the wrong thing. Often we go back to end up doing the same thing again, its muscle memory, you see the link and you go to click it and you expect it to happen. Working on cumulative layout shift gives you the opportunity to remove this frustration from your website, giving a much better user experience.

What is Speed Index?

Speed index is a more common one for people to understand, it takes a lot of complex factors and scores them in to an overall percentage score. This score can be broken down by server response times, image compression, template structure and caching methods. There are many ways this can be improved, some are quick and simple jobs and others are quite complex and time consuming. 

Why do you need to improve Web Core Vitals?

You don’t have to do any of the recommendations that Google have suggested but if you have the time, budget and resource to optimise Core Web Vitals then it can be incredibly valuable. It will improve the following as a whole

Site speed

User experience

Quality of build

Improve chances of ranking higher in search engines

and this will have long term effects on your website, just focusing on even a couple of these areas can really improve your bounce rates and search rankings which in turn can lead to an increase in leads and sales.  

Want to optimise your website’s Core Web Vitals?

You can test you website for free using Google’s Page Speed Insights tool here. If you want to learn how to improve on any of these factors then please get in contact using the form below.

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