Google Core Web Vitals
Google recently released an important set of ranking factors based on website speed, performance, and the experience it delivers – Core Web Vitals. Websites those fulfilled these criteria are rewarded the top positions in SERP by Google.
In this blog, you’ll learn why core web vitals are the No.1 priority now and how to improvise them for your site.
Google’s core web vitals are a set of performance metrics dedicated to measuring a website’s overall use and satisfaction. Core web vitals are an initiative by Google to help you as a website owner improve your site’s speed and usability. Through these metrics, you can refine the user interaction and engagement of your website.
When Google’s page experience update rolled out, just 4% of the websites got qualified. With site speed and user experience as the core of SEO ranking, all eCommerce business owners, marketers, and developers are thriving hard to adhere to all the standards listed.
In this enraged competition, even the smallest improvements in your website performance can add to your Core Web Vitals score.
Thus, it is important to fix these Core Web Vitals as these can and will be affecting your website’s ranking.
Google Core Web Vitals for eCommerce SEO
How to improve the Core Web Vitals of your eCommerce store?
Even the smallest improvement in the user experience can leverage your site’s performance and ranking. Below are 9 effective ways by which you can boost your Core Web Vitals scores like never before.
- Preload key resources
- Minimize long JavaScript (JS) execution
- Implement lazy loading
- Optimize images
- Give dimensions to images & embeds
- Keep the template mobile-friendly
- Enhance server response time
- Improvise loading third-party scripts
- Audit for security issues
#1 Preload key resources
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is one of the crucial metrics among the 3 core web vitals and it measures the loading time of the web page.
The main indicator in this is how fast the main on-page elements load and start appearing on the folds.
To know the LCP element of your page, you can inspect the specific page in Chrome DevTools. Under the performance tab, you can find the waterfall chart of the same.
Once you figure out what the LCP element of your page is you can simply find out its loading time using the Performance tab in the Chrome DevTools.
To improve the speed of loading of your LCP element, you can preload your browser and let it fetch the key resources on priority first.
#2 Minimize long JavaScript (JS) execution
First Delay Input (FID) is Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV) that measures the load responsiveness of your web pages. To provide a “good” user experience as per Google’s performance range your FID score must be below 100 milliseconds and to obtain this score you need to consider optimizing your JavaScript execution.
i.e, By reducing the JavaScript execution you reduce the time between the browser execution JS code and page.
How to reduce JavaScript execution?
One of the best ways by which you can reduce the execution is by deferring unused JS.
Step 1: Go to your website -> Right-click & choose inspect.
Step 2: Click ‘Source’
Step 3: Add ‘Coverage’ & press load function
Once the load is completed, you will find how much JavaScript is not used on your web page.
Resolve the amount of unused JS and ones contributing to the blockage of the main thread by code splitting and making scripts in smaller chunks.
#3 Implement lazy loading
Lazy-loading is an approach to defer downloading a page’s resource until it’s needed. This conserves data and lowers network contention for critical assets.
Lazy loading is highly recommended for your eCommerce site if it contains more product images, demo videos, animations, or any other heavy multimedia content. Though there is no rule that Lazy loading is mandatory, users do see a significant improvement in the LCP scores after lazy loading implementation.
Lazy loading allows the loading of images at the right moment when the visitor scrolls down the page without compromising the site’s loading speed. This way Lazy loading helps you achieve the top LCP score.
What are the other benefits of using Lazy loading for your eCommerce store?
- Improving site performance
- Limiting bandwidth usage
- Improving website’s SEO
- Reducing bounce rate
- Increasing user engagement and interaction
#4 Optimize images
Large images are obvious to slow down your website’s loading speed. Large images pull down your largest contentful paint (LCP) score for any. To give your visitors a better user experience, make your page lighter, and improve the loading speed, optimizing the images is the key.
Compression is one of the best solutions for optimizing your images. There are a ton of tools to help you with this. In most cases, compression or reducing the size of the image doesn’t destroy the image quality or resolution when done right.
What are the best ways to optimize images?
- Use the right formats such as jpg for landscape, png for graphics to improve your website’s LCP score.
- Use the latest ones such as JPEG 2000, WebP, or JPEG XR to deliver high-quality images at smaller image sizes.
- Other than compressing, you can also activate Content Delivery Network (CDN) for images. This enables images to load faster when accessed from farther geographical locations by accessing the closest server, as the servers are distributed in many locations.
#5 Give dimensions to images & embeds
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the total of all unexpected layout shifts that occur in the entire lifespan of the page. The score can be anywhere from zero to a positive number (Zero means no shifting and the bigger the number, the more layout shift it denotes).
For a good user experience, the website should have a CLS score of 0.1 or less and most sites fail to obtain this because of dimensionless images and embeds in CSS file.
When the right amount of space is not allocated to an element in a page, the element is sure to move beyond its assigned space to accommodate itself. This shift or movement of the element affects the CLS score of the page
Similarly, sudden or unplanned additions to the page also cause layout shifts.
How to avoid unnecessary movements in the layout?
- Always plan and assign space for the elements with proper settings in terms of height and width.
- Give precise dimensions to embeds so that the browser clearly understands the space needed for the particular element.
- By adding height and width for images in the CSS, you reduce elements jumping while loading, making it appear stable. You can follow the same with the regular responsive images.
- To manage jumping ads or injected content, you can reserve space for them as well.
#6 Keep the template mobile-friendly
The loading time, interactivity, and stability of your website on mobile devices are the core determiners of your website ranking.
If mobile is the topmost traffic source of your eCommerce website then the need to keep your website mobile-friendly goes without saying. Your eCommerce store’s layout on smartphones and its usability on mobile devices decide the ultimate user experience score.
To keep track of these metrics on mobile devices, you can use the Mobile Usability report in Google Search Console. This tool reports issues such as text too small or big, content not fitting the mobile screen, listing affected URLs, and more.
Or you can also run your templates through the Mobile-Friendly Test of Google to spot the errors in the individual pages of your site.
#7 Enhance server response time
The longer it takes to load, the poorer your Core web Vitals metric scores are. Longer loading times negatively influence not only your UX but also your ranking in SERPs.
What are the steps to optimize the server?
- Upgrade your hosting plan to improve the performance of your site.
- Optimize and enhance the process of how the server responds to requests.
- Upgrade the hardware if needed.
- Refine how your databases work and make improvements.
- Utilize tools like Query Monitor WordPress plugin to constantly analyze queries on your site.
- Once again, use CDN to magically improve your Core Web Vitals.
- Use Time to First Byte (TTFB) to identify the time taken by the user’s web browser to receive the first byte of your page’s content. It includes DNS lookup and time to establish a connection using a TCP handshake and SSL handshake if a request is made over HTTPS.
- Make use of tools such as the Query Monitor WordPress plugin to analyze the queries on your site.
- Review your plugins additional that can negatively impact your site’s performance. Have only the necessary ones.
All these together can help your server response time to come down below 600 milliseconds.
#8 Improvise loading third-party scripts
When your site relies on scripts from a third party such as the ad provider, it may slow down your website to a greater extent. In such cases, include ads only if they are really necessary or try finding another provider.
Try optimizing your server by retaining scripts that add value and eliminating others. You can also experiment with hosting scripts yourself to gain control over the loading time.
#9 Audit for security issues
Google has always been fierce on ranking websites that are safe to users on the top. Along with performance, loading time, and mobile usability, security plays a critical role in UX.
Any security concern – malware, unnecessary software, phishing, obscene content – affects the place of the website in the SERP results.
To get a detailed idea about your website on whether it has qualified the security parameters laid out by Google or not, you can check your Google Search Console’s security issues report. It can be located under the Security & Manual Actions tab.
Got questions about Google Core Web Vitals? Here are the answers to the most frequently asked questions:
Core Web Vitals FAQs
1. How will you bring the page speed score above 90?
It involves a series of optimization steps ranging from image compression to powering your browser. Precisely, the following 4 steps help you get the page speed score above 90:
- Compress all images.
- Enable GZIP compression on server.
- Power browser caching of static assets.
- And at last, eliminate render-blocking resources like Javascript and CSS.
2. We have already done image optimization, how different is your image compression strategy?
Our image compression strategy involves four crucial attributes.
- Conversion
- Website speed
- User experience
- SEO image optimization
- Image optimization for conversion. i.e, Images are properly optimized without losing their visual quality intact.
- Image optimization for website speed. i.e, Image size is reduced for a lot easier and faster display of the full page.
- Image optimization for user experience. i.e, Having backups and small file size images help grow a faster responsive website.
- SEO Image optimization – Little tweaks to make a webpage more readable for search engine crawlers for higher ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
3. What tools do we need to use for Image compression?
There are tons and tons of free online image optimization tools available. Here are a few that you can try.
- Caesium Image Compressor
- TinyPNG
- JPEG Optimizer
- Imagine
- Optimole
- ImageRecycle
- CompressNow
- Online Image Optimizer
- GiftOfSpeed
- Image Resizer
4. What are the other tools to validate speed other than Google PageSpeed Insights?
The top tools that can help you validate page load to improve website performance are
- Google Chrome DevTools
- Sematext
- Pingdom Speed Test
- Uptrends
- WebPageTest
- GTmetrix
- Varvy Pagespeed Optimization
- Website Audit
- Site 24×7
- Yellow Lab Tools
5. What is the best score in Google PageSpeed Insights?
Anything 90 or above is considered to be the best score in PageSpeed Insights. A score between 50-90 is considered “needs improvement” and less than 50 as “poor”. This PSI score summarizes your page’s simulated performance and is calculated by running Lighthouse.
Bottomline
By incorporating the above-mentioned tips, you can leverage your page experience optimization, in turn improving your site’s page experience signals.
Other than topping the SERPs, when these core web vitals are fully fixed or optimized the conversion rates of the sites are seen to spike. And the number of visitors converting into buyers also increases.
Thus supercharge your Core web vitals score and propel your business growth with our Core Web Vitals audit. This free audit helps you identify where you’re lagging and optimize your performance scores. It also helps you discover new growth opportunities and accelerate online conversions.
If you’re looking for more expert insights reach out to our Core Web Vital Specialists today.
