Elevate Your Website's User Experience with Google Core Web Vitals
Google Core Web Vitals are a set of three metrics that assess real-world user experience on your website. They are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures the time it takes for the largest content element on your page to load.
- First Input Delay (FID): This measures the time it takes for the browser to respond to user input.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This measures the amount of layout shift that occurs on your page after it has started loading.
Why are Core Web Vitals important?
Core Web Vitals are important because they are a signal to Google that your website is providing a good user experience. If your website has good Core Web Vitals scores, it is more likely to rank higher in Google search results.
How to Google Core Web Vitals for your website
There are a few different ways to Google Core Web Vitals for your website. Here are three of the most popular:
- PageSpeed Insights: PageSpeed Insights is a free tool that you can use to test your website's Core Web Vitals. To use PageSpeed Insights, simply enter your website's URL into the tool and click "Test."
- Search Console: Search Console is a free tool that you can use to track your website's performance in Google Search. To use Search Console, you will need to verify that you own your website. Once you have verified your website, you can access the Core Web Vitals report in the Search Console dashboard.
- Chrome DevTools: Chrome DevTools is a built-in tool in the Chrome browser that you can use to debug your website's performance. To use Chrome DevTools, open DevTools by pressing F12 (Windows) or Cmd+Option+I (Mac). Then, select the "Performance" tab and click the "Run" button.
How to improve your Core Web Vitals
There are a few things that you can do to improve your Core Web Vitals. Here are a few tips:
- Minimize render-blocking resources: Render-blocking resources are resources that prevent the browser from rendering the page until they have been loaded. This can include CSS files, JavaScript files, and images. To minimize render-blocking resources, you can inline CSS and JavaScript, and use lazy loading for images.
- Defer non-critical JavaScript: Non-critical JavaScript is JavaScript that is not needed for the initial rendering of the page. To defer non-critical JavaScript, you can use the async or defer attribute on your script tags.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN): A CDN is a network of servers that deliver content to users based on their geographic location. This can help to improve the performance of your website for users who are located around the world.
- Properly size and optimize images: Images can be a major source of bloat on your website. To properly size and optimize images, you can use a tool like JPEGmini or TinyPNG.
- Minify CSS and JavaScript: Minification is the process of removing whitespace and other unnecessary characters from CSS and JavaScript files. This can help to reduce the size of your files and improve the performance of your website.
Conclusion
Improving your Core Web Vitals is a great way to improve the user experience on your website. By following the tips in this article, you can start to improve your website's performance and ranking in Google search results.