the importance of Google Core Web Vitals on your website | sigoti

having strong Core Web Vitals will help your website rank higher in search results, increase traffic to your site, and boost sales. if your Core Web Vitals are not where you want them to be, read this article for tips on how to improve them.

all of the essential elements that Google deems important in a webpage’s overall user experience have been rolled into one specific factor, known as “Core Web Vitals.” Core Web Vitals are made up of the following three factors:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) - measured by looking at the size of the largest text on the page for each device;
• First Input Delay (FID) - the time it takes for the page to respond to the first tap or click; and
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) - how quickly it loads, how easily users can interact with the page and how quickly users can find what they're looking for.

the importance of the Core Web Vitals correlates directly with Google’s promotion of a user-friendly browsing experience. this means that HTTPS, mobile friendliness, lack of pop-ups, and malware-free websites have become a key requirement for higher Google rankings.

Google Core Web Vitals is all about helping you run your website better. it’s about your site’s security, speed and mobile readiness. we recommend you to regularly check your website for the following:

• is your site secure? adding HTTPS, using secure certificates and checking if your site has been hacked will help to ensure this.
• make sure your site loads fast! first impressions count so if your site takes longer than 4 seconds it will lose up to 70% of its potential visitors.
• check that your website works well on mobile devices. 25% of all website traffic now comes from mobile devices. be sure that mobile users can easily navigate through your site.

while this is vital to do, there are some key rules to improve Core Web Vitals starting with your site’s LCP:

• remove any unnecessary scripts that are hosted externally.
• upgrade your web host into one that has better performance.
• set up lazy loading images and remove large page elements in order to reduce the load time of the page.

to improve your site’s FID scores:

• minimise (or defer) JavaScript: it’s pretty much impossible to create an interaction with your page while the browser is loading up Javascript.
• remove any non-critical third-party scripts.
• use a browser cache to help load content on your page faster.

finally, here are some easy ways to limit the CLS:

• ensure that all of your media (videos; images etc.) have a set size attribute dimension. this way, the user's browser knows exactly how much space that div element will take up. and will not adjust it as the page fully loads.
• use an HTML tag to reserve a page space for ads: otherwise, they might suddenly appear on the page, pushing content down, up or to the side.
• add new content below the fold: this will keep content right where the user expects it to stay.

with a little help from the team at Sigoti, you can learn a lot about your website and how to improve it. contact us today to schedule a Core Web Vitals review for your website.