Are you looking to improve your website’s rankings and performance? Optimizing your website’s Core Web Vitals is an essential part of the process. In May 2021, Google updated its ranking algorithm to include Core Web Vitals as a factor in determining website rankings. This guide from an SEO company includes tips on how to optimize your website’s Core Web Vitals for better rankings.
What are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are a set of three metrics that Google uses to measure the user experience of a website. These metrics include:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures the loading performance of a website’s main content.
- First Input Delay (FID): Measures the interactivity of a website by measuring the time it takes for a user to interact with a website after clicking a link or button.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures the visual stability of a website by measuring the frequency and impact of layout shifts during a user’s visit.
5 Tips to Optimize Your Core Web Vitals:
- Optimize Images and Videos:
Images and videos can significantly impact page load speed and user experience. When you optimize images, you can reduce their file size without sacrificing quality. This reduces the time it takes for your webpages to load, making them faster and more responsive.
When it comes to video optimization, it is essential to choose the right encoding settings. Consider using the latest standards such as H.264 or HEVC codecs and make sure that you keep an eye on bitrate, resolution, and frame rate.
2. Minimize Server Response Time
The server response time is a measure of how quickly a website’s server responds to a request from the browser. Ensure that your server response time is as low as possible. This can be achieved by choosing a high-quality hosting provider, optimizing your server configuration, and using a content delivery network (CDN).
3. Prioritize Main Content Loading
The faster the main content loads, the better your website’s user experience will be. That’s why Google has placed such an emphasis on core web vitals when it comes to rankings. This includes text, images, and videos that are essential for the user experience. Use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to identify elements of your website that are slowing down your LCP.
4. Improve Mobile Responsiveness
Google ranks websites higher if they perform well on mobile devices, and improving your mobile responsiveness is an important step to improving your core web vitals scores. Utilize responsive design to ensure that your website’s layout adjusts to fit different screen sizes. And as mentioned earlier, prioritize the loading of your website’s main content on mobile devices.
5. Use Caching
Caching helps store data from a web page in the user’s browser or server, so that when the user returns to the page, the data can be retrieved quickly. This will reduce the number of requests your website has to make to load these resources, improving your website’s loading speed and stability.
By following the tips outlined in this blog post, you will notice great improvement in your site’s Core Web Vitals over time. Talk to the experts of a digital marketing agency if you need any assistance.
