UK Digital Marketing – Award-Winning Digitial Marketing & SEO Agency, Bristol

Optimising your website for speed is not just a preference; it’s a strategic imperative. A great website not only needs to load swiftly but also needs to seamlessly funnel and convert visitors into customers – your website must aim to deliver a digital experience that aligns perfectly with both user expectations and search engine algorithms.

This is precisely where Google’s Core Web Vitals come into play. Beyond mere functionality, they serve as the blueprint for benchmarking and achieving optimal website performance, ensuring a smooth user experience and favourable rankings on the SERP.

What Are Core Web Vitals?

Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV) centre around three performance metrics that evaluate real-world user experience:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric measures the loading performance of a website. It evaluates the time taken by the largest content element on the screen to load. To provide a good user experience, strive to have LCP occur within the first 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load.

• First Input Delay (FID): This metric measures the interactivity of a website. It evaluates the time taken by the website to respond to the user’s first interaction. To provide a good user experience, strive to have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This metric measures the visual stability of a website. It evaluates the amount of unexpected layout shift that occurs during the loading of a website. To provide a good user experience, strive to have a CLS score of less than0.1.

To optimise your website for Core Web Vitals, you need to focus on improving these three metrics. 

Here are some tips to help you get started:

• Optimise images and videos to improve loading times

You can use image optimisation tools to compress your images without losing quality. You can also use responsive images to serve different sizes of images based on the user’s device. For videos, you can use video compression tools to reduce their size.

• Use a content delivery network (CDN) to reduce server response times

A CDN is a network of servers that cache your website’s content and deliver it to users from the server closest to them. This reduces the distance between the user and the server, which in turn reduces server response times.

• Minimise third-party scripts and plugins that can slow down your website

Third-party scripts and plugins can add extra HTTP requests to your website, which can slow down your website. You can use a tool like GTmetrix to identify which scripts and plugins are slowing down your website and remove them if they are not essential.

• Use lazy loading to defer the loading of non-critical resources 

Lazy loading is a technique that defers the loading of images and videos until the user scrolls down to them. This reduces the initial load time of your website and improves the user experience.

• Optimise your CSS and JavaScript to improve loading times

You can use a range of tools to remove unnecessary characters from your CSS and JavaScript files. You can also use Gzip compression to reduce the file size of your CSS and JavaScript files.

• Use a caching plugin to improve server response times and page load times

A caching plugin stores a copy of your website’s pages in the user’s browser cache. This reduces the number of HTTP requests made to your server and improves server response times.

• Track your website’s performance and identify areas for improvement

You can use a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights to analyse your website’s performance and identify areas for improvement. You can also use a tool like GTmetrix to monitor your website’s performance over time and receive alerts when your website’s performance drops below a certain threshold.

By following some of these practical tips, you can improve your website’s Core Web Vitals metrics and provide a better user experience for your visitors. Remember, a fast and responsive website is essential for ranking well in Google search results.

​Award-Winning SEO Services & Digital Marketing Agency, Bristol

Pay As You Go. No Long Term Contracts

At UK Digital Marketing, we offer website design and SEO services to boost your online presence and reach more customers. We design and build responsive websites and offer digital marketing services that increase your traffic and conversions. With our Digital Marketing and SEO specialist solutions, you can grow your business and achieve better results online.

Our track record speaks volumes – plus, we’re proud winners of multiple awards!  

Contact us to get started.