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Running a website can sometimes seem like a never-ending stream of tests. Despite the potential redundancy, they’re important enough for Google to dedicate an entire project. Core Web Vitals for WordPress measures your site’s performance based on real-world usage.
Core Web Vitals examines three metrics, and Google considers them all relevant to the entire User Experience (UX). Learning about (and improving) them can lead to potential gains in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
As such, this post will examine Core Web Vitals for WordPress and precisely how to improve them. Before this, we’ll discuss the project itself.
What Core Web Vitals Are (And Why You Need to Measure Them)
In a nutshell, Core Web Vitals for WordPress is a Google project that formalizes three metrics that are important to UX. The metrics have ‘wordy’ names, but they’re easy to digest once you understand their context:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Measures how long it takes for the most significant element on the screen to load once a user navigates to a URL. In other words, it’s a loading performance metric.
- First Input Delay (FID) is the time between a user clicking an interactive element and the browser responding. It measures the interactivity of your web page.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). The final metric is a touch more challenging to explain. It returns the total of any ‘layout shifts’ during a page’s lifespan. In other words, it will log whenever your page’s elements change position. CLS is a visual stability metric and looks at how aspects of the page are loaded and rendered.
These metrics would be necessary even without the Core Web Vitals for the WordPress project. The core concepts of performance, interaction, and visual stability are crucial elements to monitor, and as such, “Core Web Vitals” is an apt name. What’s more, they could potentially affect your entire SEO strategy.
How Your Core Web Vitals Affect Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you’re asking us whether Core Web Vitals affects your SEO at the current time of writing (i.e., second-quarter 2021), the answer is a shaky “No”. However, starting in June 2021, Core Web Vitals will become a part of Google’s Page Experience signals.
In other words, you’ll need to work now to ensure you’re ready. Core Web Vitals will affect search results for desktop and mobile and will even determine whether your pages are included in the Top Stories panel (as opposed to using Google AMP to tick this box in the past).
To boost your ranking, it would help if you met all of the Core Web Vitals. They are necessary and central to your SEO, so bringing your sites into line now could help you break away from the competition.
How to Test Your WordPress Site’s Core Web Vitals
The good news is that Google lets you monitor your Core Web Vitals using multiple tools within its ecosystem. PageSpeed Insights, Search Console, and the Chrome UX Report all let you measure the three metrics.
Despite this, Chrome’s DevTools and Lighthouse don’t let you monitor all of the Core Web Vitals, and we wouldn’t rely on the latter. Core Web Vitals uses real-world data (called ‘field data’) rather than lab data to report back.
PageSpeed Insights provides the best and most straightforward way to test Core Web Vitals. Once you plugin your domain and begin the analysis, you’ll get a report showing the field data at the top and the Core Web Vitals marked with a blue ribbon icon:
It will give you an overview of how your site performs. For more details on what PageSpeed Insights has found, scroll to the Diagnostics section. You will see a display of every metric recorded. Each Core Web Vital will be displayed, along with specific elements taken into account:
In some cases, you may need to scroll to the Passed audits section and find the specific metric:
FID is more arduous to diagnose, although we suggest leaving your metric marked as good. The audits list does not provide direct insight, although next, we’ll discuss what you can look at instead.
How to Improve Your Core Web Vitals
You’re in the clear about whether your PageSpeed Insights report has returned without any wounds. However, for most websites, there will often be one or two elements you can improve.
First, Input Delay is the toughest metric to fix, as there isn’t any direct correlation between the audit list and the metric itself. We advise starting with the Minimize third-party usage audit and seeing if anything is worth investigating.
From here, you’ll want to minimize JavaScript loads that directly impact FID.
When it comes to CLS, WordPress does a lot of this work for you. For example, you’ll want to ensure images, embeds, iFrames, and ads have set dimensions. It happens within WordPress anyway, so it will be more relevant if you’re working on custom elements under the hood of your site.
When it comes to LCP, there are a lot of areas to look at, and most are simple fixes:
- Cache your site’s pages for both the server and browser.
- Optimize your images and site’s code.
- Use GZIP compression on the server side.
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve pages fast, regardless of your user’s location.
Fixing LCP has a knock-on effect with other Core Web Vitals, so spending more time here than in the different areas will benefit you.
Wrapping Up
Google is the most dominant search engine, so anything they decree is often crucial to heed. The Core Web Vitals project merges three key site metrics and formalizes them as central to the user’s web experience.
This post examined how Core Web Vitals can improve WordPress’s performance, interactivity, and visual stability. The great news is that WP Tech Support can help you speed up your site, essential to preserving existing rankings and future growth. It can also improve the overall page load time and user experience for desktop and mobile visitors to your website.
Check out our WordPress Speed Optimization Service to learn more about how we can improve your Core Web Vitals.