Many organisations are looking for ways to improve their website’s conversion rates. This is because more than 30% of visitors will exit your site if it doesn’t load within 4 seconds, and close to 50% don’t bother waiting. If you’re not driving traffic to your site, then you’re missing out on conversions.
Core Web Vitals is an interactive dashboard that displays the vital statistics of a website. It also provides marketers with insights into how consumers interact with their sites and improve their online presence. The dashboard features charts, graphs, and data points on Google Analytics, Google Search Console and more. The information can be filtered by site type or country of origin for even more granular analysis.
The Core Web Vitals dashboard will help you decide your digital strategy based on the numbers. The following are the three main Core Web Vitals to use.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
The LCP is the amount of time it takes for a web page to load from when you first open up your browser window. The word, “Paint” as in “put up all things seen on screen” refers to how much content needs loading before it can be viewed fully and comfortably with no hiccups or glitches.
The time it takes for your browser to load a web page and what is seen on screen when you first open the document or web page. Pages with lots of graphics may take longer than regular text-based sites because they require more work from the computer’s processor.
Google claims that this measurement looks at the render time of the largest visible image or text block on a website rather than DOM loading. This DOM was used in the past by many developers who often say “the DOM” when referring to pages with heavy JavaScript usage like plugins from sites like Facebook.
To check the LCP score, use Google Search Console to see the performance of your pages. The score is generally rated as ‘Good,’ ‘Needs Improvement,’ and ‘Poor.’ Less than 2.5 seconds of paint time is Good, while 4 seconds and more are graded as poor.
How To Improve Your LCP:
1. Remove large page elements like videos or heavy images.
2. Delete unnecessary third party-scripts.
3. Minimize your CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for a significant improvement.
- First Input Delay (FID)
The First Input Delay (FID) is the time it takes for a user to interact with your page. This may include selecting an item from a dropdown menu, clicking on something in site navigation links, or entering their email address into any field labeled “required” when they visit your website’s pages. The FID is more than just a page speed score as it measures how fast users actually start doing something on the page- as described by the actions above.
This Core Web Vital not only measures the time it takes for a user to be able to execute an action on your site but can be used to predict how long people will stay engaged with your content. This information is essential to know for marketing purposes as well!
How To Improve A Websites FID:
- Use a web browser cache to help load the page faster.
- Delete any non-necessary third-party scripts like analytics to improve the speed.
- Minimize the website’s JavaScript because it does not allow users to interact with the page when it’s loading.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
The Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a way to measure and quantify how much various pieces of content on the website jump around as it loads. Most websites have some sort or another, but some may be worse than others!
When a website has been the victim of cumulative layout shifts, it can experience many different symptoms. The text might start coming out in chaotic blocks or sentences which are difficult to read for visitors and search engine crawlers alike. This is not just because one page has changed but how they’re all connected together since links no longer work appropriately between pages with conflicting stylesheets loaded on them.
The movement might also depend on the computer processing power available when running tests with this type of data – both in terms of speed AND accuracy.
A Cumulative Layout Shift is therefore a Core Web vital metric that measures how well real users experience a page on the web.
A Cumulative Layout Shift score is the summation of all individual layout shifts on a page and results in one number. This type of assessment is called “Cumulative” since it considers all changes made throughout each phase (i.e., pre-loading).
The CLS score of your website is graded by Google as ‘Good,’ ‘Needs Improvement,’ and ‘Poor.’ A Good CLS score is 0.1 or less. A CLS score of 0.1 and 0.25 is ‘Needs Improvement’ while a score of more than 0.25 is ‘Poor.’
How To Improve Your CLS:
1. Create set dimensions for media (videos, images, infographics, GIF’s), using CSS or <img> tag.
2. Allocate space for your page Ads. However, do not place ads at the top of a page because they easily cause a shift in the content.
3. If you must embed content from another platform, it is best to pre-calculate its space and add its dimensions to the embed code. This helps the browser know how much space to reserve for them when calculating the page’s layout.
In conclusion, The Core Web Vitals of Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) are very important in measuring a website’s effectiveness to users. Though they can be difficult to measure or define, they all contribute to the user experience on your site.
A slow-loading page with an unclear layout is not suitable for any business as it will decrease customer satisfaction and lead conversions down significantly. Make sure that these measurements don’t become too high. If you want more information about how we help companies increase their ROI by reducing errors like this, give us a call!
