Core Web Vitals and Their Positive Impact on SEO Rankings
If you want to ace your online presence today, you’ll have to ace the performance of your website. Suppose a user searches for a product your company sells, will it not be the wisest move to ensure your website ranks among the 2-3 Google search results? This will invariably boost your traffic and solidify your brand awareness. But how do you do this? With a lucrative SEO strategy!
SEO catalyzes the organic growth of your webpage, which in fact is backed by statistical data from BrightEdge. The report says nearly 53.31% of traffic is retrieved from organic search!
Well, there are a bunch of factors on which SEO depends like mobile responsiveness, SERPs, keywords, etc. “Core Web Vitals” ranks as the second-most deciding factor in optimizing SEO for any website, with a staggering 10.8% votes in a survey. This blog is all about digging deep into this fascinating algorithm brought into effect by Google. Read along to learn about its importance, impact, and strategies to implement the best way to improve SEO!
Core Web Vitals – When Was It Released And The Intention Behind It?
As a matter of fact, Google always gives priority to websites serving their audiences with the best user experience. In the year 2021, Google introduced its Google Page Experience Update, which includes points and factors that influence the rankings of the websites on SERPs.
As already mentioned in the introductory section of the blog, multiple factors play a role in deciding the overall performance of the webpage, like a mobile-optimized website, HTTP responsiveness, absence of intrusive pop-ups, etc. Among them, Google stacked these 3 factors – Loading, Interactivity, and Visual Stability and termed them together as “Core Web Vitals”.
The metrics mentioned above function as efficient tiebreakers when content alone can’t be a deciding factor for Google to index its pages.
Read More About Mobile Optimization
The 3 Basic Metrics of Core Web Vitals
An extremely crucial point about Core Web Vitals(CWV) is to know about their three basic metrics.
1) Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) –
This is the time required to load the most prominent content of the page, which are sometimes referred to as the “hero images”.
2) First Input Delay (FID) –
This is basically the delay between the user’s first interaction with the page(for eg, clicking a link for the first time) and the response time of the site to deliver that interaction.
3) Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) –
This measures the unwanted layout shifts upon loading the page. Different elements load at different speeds and may cause unusual content shifts. The higher the score, the greater the extent of the shift.
An important update has been issued by Google in this context. Starting in March 2024, Interaction to Next Paint(INP) will replace FID as a metric for determining CWV scores.
Unlike FID, which measures the first-time interaction of a user with the page, INP takes into account the total time from all sorts of user interactions and not just the first time. This includes key presses, clicks, and taps.
Notable Impacts of Core Web Vitals On Website Rankings
Google officials have confirmed Core Web Vitals as an important parameter in determining the search rankings of the page. Core Web Vitals focuses mainly on the experience of the users, thus a fast-loading page with zero-to-no server setbacks will ideally be the first choice for the search engine. On the contrary, slow and unresponsive pages will fetch a low score in CWV metrics.
Vodafone, the leading Italian telecommunications company, has notably bagged 8% more sales towards its bottom of the funnel by improving its LCP by 31%! A/B testing helped greatly in this success. 192% domain rankings uplift and 80-100% mobile conversion rates were achieved by RedBus in its global market, by intelligently ameliorating a few CWV metrics. Some of the methods the company implemented are reducing the CLS from 1.65 to 0 and the TTI score from 8 seconds to 4 seconds. More such case studies include Nykaa, which generated 20% more traffic from Tier 2 / 3 cities, by boosting the LCP score to nearly 40%.
Through these examples, it is clear that investing in good Core Web Vitals will be a huge win for your website and consequently affect your business.
How To Improve Your CWV Game Bigger And Better?
Highlighting and glorifying the impact of Core Web Vitals must surely be riveting for the readers. But how to ace this CWV game? In this section, the most effective strategies are discussed to enhance your website’s score!
- Pay attention to the caching ability of your website. This decreases the time of file rendering on your page. A Content Delivery Network(CDN) server handles the cached data, which includes HTML, CSS, and JS codes. etc.
- While writing the code for the website, clearly mention the width and height attributes of images and other media, and don’t keep it blank. This ensures the browser is ready to load those files on time upon user request. Mentioning proper dimensions may significantly improve the LCP score!
- Consider using “Lazy Loading”, which defers the page from rendering and loading contents before the user needs it. Whichever framework you are using – be it React or Angular, such codes can be integrated to boost the website loading speed greatly.
- Always prioritize first-party scripts over third-party plugins. These third-party plugins may affect the performance of your website negatively, thus design your page in such a way that it loads the third-party scripts only on-demand.
- To optimize your Core Web Vitals more and more, you should use CSS Font Loading API. Font-face rules in CSS have the built-in property of lazy loading. Though it may seem perfectly fine, this may result in unnecessary delays while loading websites. Using this API handovers considerable authority to user agents to track and measure these font faces.
- Choosing Server-Side Rendering is a formidable way to reduce the loading speed of websites, especially for dynamic and large e-commerce pages.
- Lay stress on the hosting plan you’re currently using. A low-quality hosting can cost the response time of your website. You can also switch to cloud hosting solutions to handle traffic in an efficient way.
Exploring these strategies can be a game-changing move to multiply your CWV scores. And who knows, your brand may be enlisted in the section of case studies discussed above!
Tracking and Monitoring the Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals requires routine checking and monitoring and is definitely not a one-time affair. Here are a few platforms that let you check and work on your CWV scores!
1) Google PageSpeed Insights –
This service by Google is an awesome way to deduce your actual Core Web Vital’s metric scores. Additionally, you shall also receive tips to improve the diagnostics of your website.
2) CrUX –
The Chrome User Experience Report(CrUX) is also a great platform to get insights about the experience of real-world users on your website. Several metrics like FID, LCP, CLS, Onload, INP, etc are integrated for use.
Google LightHouse –
LightHouse is an extension provided to be added to the Chrome browser, which allows web designers to optimize the performance, speed, and interactivity of websites.
Wrapping Up
Well, that’s indeed a lot of information and useful insights about Core Web Vitals to work on. To gain as well as to maintain a reputed online presence through your website, you need to be constantly updated on Google’s ever-changing policies. You can hire an experienced company like Eco York to help set up your SEO strategy for success.
Backed by reliable facts and figures, optimizing Core Web Vitals arguably stands out as the best way to improve SEO. Do it yourself or through agencies, investing time and money in Core Web Vitals will fetch you a promising return!
