We all know that Google is the UK’s leading search engine. Getting to the top of the listings for Google searches can transform a business, but there’s so much more to it than paid adverts. Google is constantly monitoring websites so it can offer the best service to people searching, and if it doesn’t think yours is good enough, it simply won’t get shown.

So what can you do?

Core Web Vitals are ways that Google measures the speed and visitor experience of your Wordpress site. Improving your Core Web Vitals will help your SEO and user experience, and from there, could make your site more likely to be promoted in Google’s rankings.

What are the Core Web Vitals?

Largest Contentful Paint – LCP

• This measures loading performance of the largest element on a page, so usually an image, text of video. This should be 2.5 seconds or less.

First Input Delay – FID

• This measures interactivity, and how long it takes from first loading the page until a visitor can interact with it. This should be 100 milliseconds or less.

Cumulative Layout Shift – CLS

• This measures visual stability, or how much the parts of the page move as the others load. This should be 0.1 or less to keep Google happy.

How can you measure Core Web Vitals for your website?

There are three Google tools that can help to measure your Core Web Vitals.

1. Page Speed Insights – an online tool that you can use to test a particular page of your site.
2. Google Search Console – reporting on each page across your site.
3. Chrome User Experience Report – The experience real-world users of your site will receive.

How to improve your Core Web Vitals

There are a number of improvements that you can look at to boost the performance of your site; here’s a selection:

1. Optimise your Hosting.
2. Performance Plug-ins.
3. Review the fonts on your site.
4. Review image dimensions and formats, and preload banner images where possible.
5. Be aware of how you load your video content so it only loads an image initially.
6. Look at third party code, broken links and unused Javascript so your site only loads what it needs, and doesn’t struggles to find missing content.

We’ve included this post as it’s vital for businesses to have an effective website, and getting past Google’s quality filter is a big step to getting that site seen by potential customers. We’re by no means experts in the tech aspects of building or maintaining one though, so we rely heavily on our web agency, Indigo Tree Digital, to support us!

The initial version of this post was created as part of a presentation given by their MD, Louise Towler, at an event recently in Brighton. For more detail on improving your Core Web Vitals, follow this link to see her detailed blog post on the subject. This includes explanations of the ways you can improve your Core Web Vitals I’ve touched on above.