Have you Checked Your Web Vitals Lately?
Better Web Performance and Visibility Depends on Core Web Vitals
When it comes to creating a successful product for the manufacturing industry, it takes a lot of measurement and testing to get it right. Any experienced design engineer will tell you that. There are precise metrics that need to be met to ensure the product performs as it was intended. Well, it’s the same when designing a successful website. The goal is to provide a satisfying user experience so that customers will stay on your site longer and visit multiple pages, which results in increased sales qualified leads.
Google has created a new set of metrics designed to measure site speed and performance. Increasingly, they’ll begin to use these metrics to evaluate websites and determine your search engine rankings. The thinking is simple: the fastest websites provide the best customer experience, so Google will prioritize those websites by moving them to the top of page one.
These new metrics are available in a Google report known as the Core Web Vitals (CWV). Based on site activity over a 28-day period, CWV is one part of the Google Page Experience, including secure browsing, intrusive interstitials, malware, etc. Like medical vital signs for a healthy website, they consist of three measures that were announced by Google’s Chrome team last year:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- First Input Delay (FID)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
They are designed to give web developers and online business owners a consistent method of measuring key indicators of UX design, which is one of the factors Google uses to determine rankings in search engine results. Although these key metrics aren’t officially part of Googles’ ranking algorithm yet, it won’t be long before they are. This means that websites should begin to optimize in these areas now so that they can be better prepared for long-term success and stay competitive in a key marketing channel.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
LCP measures the performance of the website, specifically, how fast it loads. The threshold for passing LCP is 2.5 seconds. To put that into layman’s terms, Google is saying if all elements of your web page do not display in 2.5 seconds, including all text and website images, then it’s too slow.
First Input Delay (FID)
FID measures the amount of time it takes before the website is usable that the user is able to click and navigate without waiting on the spinning icon to stop. The new Google metric is 100 milliseconds. Now, that’s fast! It does not require all of the images to load in that timeframe, but users should be able to interact with the page somehow, such as clicking on a menu or scrolling up and down.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
CLS refers to the unexpected shifting of webpage elements while the page is still downloading. The kinds of elements that tend to cause shift are fonts, images, videos, contact forms, buttons, and other kinds of content. Google measures CLS by the visual stability of your page and requires a score of less than 0.1 of CLS.
Now that you understand how Google will begin measuring the vitality of your website, how do you ensure you get a good report? What happens if you fail? Remember, failure doesn’t mean that nobody’s visiting your website, and passing doesn’t mean that everybody’s going to your site. It’s just one of many factors that affect your search rankings.
Four Treatments to Create a Healthy Web Style
The good news is that there are several steps that you or your web designer can take to improve your diagnosis. Just as health care experts recommend remedies for what’s ailing your body, the web doctors at GGC can prescribe some great ways to improve the health of your website. Here are four treatments that will help boost the vitality of your site’s user experience:
- Server-side Page Caching
To reduce the overall time it takes for a website to load, it’s important to understand the importance of server-side page caching. For example, when a website is built on a content management system such as WordPress, the page is generated at the time the person visits the website. It’s generated by calls to a database to look up the content to dynamically create the page and then serve it to the visitor. Server-side Page Caching is a process by which the website preassembles the HTML and saves it. When a visitor asks for the HTML again, it automatically appears without having to call the database. Page caching reduces the amount of time to display the page, and can lower the LCP score.
- Image File Optimization
Image files on a website are usually saved in PNG or JPG format. These files are already optimized. JPEG was designed very early in the Internet’s development as a very small file to deliver images. To improve your CWV scores, you can optimize JPEGs further making them even smaller without losing image quality. That’s another way to reduce loading time on the site.
It’s also possible to minify HTML or JavaScript text files to reduce load time. Minifying takes out the extra spaces and characters to make the files smaller in size yet still readable. You can also minify Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) files, which are the style definition of font and color placements.
- Content Delivery Network (CDN)
CDN is a highly optimized host that has servers geographically distributed in locations around the world. Google provides a CWV report based on site activity over 28 days. The purpose of a CDN is to host certain website files that don’t often change, such as images, scripts, and stylesheets. When an image is needed, the site can call the image from the nearest CDN location. The image will arrive much faster because it’s stored on a server closer to the viewer’s location.
- Script Call Timing
Another way to optimize web performance is by controlling the timing of when scripts are being called. Sometimes a script doesn’t need to be as high up on a page and can be moved to a lower section. This allows scripts to be downloaded later, allowing the user to interact with the website while the scripts are being downloaded.
These four techniques, smartly implemented, can make Google love your website again. In the end, Google’s goal is to make sure that visitors enjoy using Google’s platform to search the web. If the sites that come up in their search results load slowly, then that could hurt Google’s business model. Marketers share this same goal. Nobody wants their website visitors to have a sub-optimal user experience and go somewhere else.
Schedule a Semi-Annual Web Check-up
One of the best ways to protect the health of your website is to have it examined every six months by a web professional who can identify any issues. The GGC web doctors know how to check your site’s vital signs and confirm that everything is in good working order. If they see vital signs that indicate a problem, they will prescribe the right treatment to get your website back to the performance levels that Google demands.
