By
•
Jul 10, 2022
Page experience has always played a crucial role in search engine optimization and Miami web design. But to take things to the next level, Google is now officially making it a direct ranking factor through Core Web Vitals.
If users have a bad experience when trying to view or navigate through your page, they'll likely leave right away and head to the next site. As a result, your bounce rate is high and your dwell time is low.
This signals to Google that your page didn't satisfy a user's search intent, and this can negatively impact your ranking.
Using the Core Web Vitals metrics, website owners like you can now monitor and improve your site’s loading speed, responsiveness, and stability to provide the ultimate web-browsing experience to users!
In this article, we’re going to share with you five essential tips on how to optimize your site for Core Web Vitals to get your site to rank higher and generate more leads for your business.
Core Web Vitals are composed of three metrics that measure a page's overall web browsing experience. These metrics score how quickly the content of a Miami web design loads, how fast a page can respond to a user’s input, and how stable the content is as it loads.
Core Web Vitals is composed of the following page speed and user interaction metrics:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
LCP seeks to address the frustrating user experience that comes with a slow-loading website. It measures how quickly the contents of a web page are loaded, specifically the time it takes for the largest image or text block to appear on a user’s screen.
According to Google, the ideal website load time is within two to five seconds. However, the goal is to get your site to load in under two seconds because the longer it takes for your site to load beyond 2 seconds, the higher your bounce rate will be.
In fact, research shows that 40% of internet users abandon sites that take longer than 3 seconds to load.
If you get a good score for your LCP, it means your site fully loads within 2.5 seconds.
First Input Delay (FID)
A website's responsiveness is a major factor to a positive user experience. When a website takes forever to respond to a click or tap, users feel frustrated and annoyed.
They want to have instantaneous interactions with webpages and be able to do what they set out to do – no delays!
FID measures how long it takes from when a user interacts with your site (i.e. when a user clicks a link or taps on a button) to the time the browser responds.
Usually, a Miami web design becomes irresponsive when a browser is too busy downloading assets, executing codes, or analyzing scripts.
For your FID to be ranked as "good", your delay should be less than 100ms.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
CLS measures how visually stable your web design in Miami is. No one likes browsing a page that suddenly changes without warning.
What happens when you’re about to tap cancel, but just before your finger lands the button suddenly moves and you hit order instead. Aside from the fact that it’s annoying, clicking something else than what you originally intended to can cause real damage.
Sudden movements or instability of page content usually occurs because resources aren’t loaded simultaneously. What makes matters worse is the fact that third-party or personalized content doesn't always behave the same in development as to how users experience it.
The CLS metric helps you address this issue by calculating how frequent this is happening to your visitors. A good CLS score is less than 0.1.
Measuring Core Web Vitals Using Google PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights is a tool that measures a page’s Core Web Vitals on both desktop and mobile. Google will rate pages based on the following rankings:
PageSpeed Insights provides aggregate and use data about your page. Aggregate refers to a page's lab data or data that is collected in a controlled environment. It provides you with insights that are useful for fixing performance issues.
User or field data, on the other hand, reveals what your site visitors are actually experiencing by obtaining real-world interactions.
This tool will also provide customized recommendations on how you can improve your pages and what to prioritize.
Now that we’ve discussed what Core Web Vitals are and how to measure your site's performance, it’s time to discuss how you can best optimize your website for a better overall web browsing experience.
.jpg)
One of the most common reasons why a website takes forever to load is because of large images. Before incorporating images into your Miami web design or uploading a blog post that contains pictures, make sure to compress the images first.
Tinypng.com is a free tool you can use to reduce the file size of your WEBP, JPEG, and PNG files. By optimizing the images on your site, you can make your pages significantly lighter, improving their loading speed. This improves your LCP results.
Layout shift is when an element like an image or video visibly changes its position on a user’s screen or dynamically resizes itself. It usually occurs because you failed to provide proper dimensions for these elements in the CSS file.
To fix this and improve your CLS score, make sure you give every element on your site the proper width and height where they should be displayed so browsers can allocate enough space for them while these elements are loading.
If you don’t specify the correct dimensions, these elements won’t load fast enough and therefore will appear last on a page since the browser doesn’t understand how much space to designate for it.
The same rule applies when inserting videos from YouTube into your site, you want to resize these videos to make sure they look okay on the front-end.
.jpg)
To make your website engaging, it needs to have several things: images, embeds, videos, product page links, and more. The problem, however, is if you don’t prioritize which assets to load first, your main content may appear last and impact the user experience.
Browsers automatically try to load all of the assets on your site consecutively. By implementing lazy loading or delaying the loading of certain elements until they're needed, you can save system resources and boost your page’s FCP performance.
In other words, content that appears above the fold should be preloaded first and any additional content should wait until a user scrolls down to see it. For example, if your homepage has an image that a visitor has to scroll down to see, you can display a placeholder and only load the image in full when he/she has arrived at its location.
A placeholder is what appears in an image’s container until the photo is loaded. Examples of placeholders are dominant color placeholders we commonly see being used in Pinterest and Google image search results and low-quality, blurred versions of the original picture.
Implementing lazy loading can also boost your site’s SEO!
If your website contains a lot of animations, images, and videos, use lazy loading to your advantage.
The longer it takes for a user’s browser to receive content from your site’s server, the longer it takes to render anything on the screen. By minimizing the lag time and shortening server response time, you can significantly improve your page’s LCP.
To achieve this, use a content delivery network (CDN) to cache page information. A cache is like a memory bank that stores data about your website.
So, whenever a user visits your site, a cache provides easy access to the content of your pages instead of re-downloading them every time. This makes it easier to quickly retrieve and render data which reduces page load speed.
Using a CDN enables you to spread your network out. This means that your website can be loaded from several different servers, including those that are closest to your web visitors.
As a result, your web pages load faster and your page speed score will increase.
Aside from using CDN for your site, make sure to also review your plugins. Plugins can sometimes take up a lot of space and therefore impact your site’s performance.
You’d also want to minimize JavaScript execution time and use as little memory as possible because more bytes mean longer download times.
To reduce JavaScript execution time, you can do the following:
.jpg)
After you’ve reduced the file size of your images, provided proper dimensions, implemented lazy loading, and shortened your server response time, evaluate your site’s performance to make the additional changes necessary.
Remember, doing an audit of your site’s performance should be a regular thing. You want to make sure that your website is up to Google’s standards.
Aside from using Google PageSpeed Insights to analyze every page on your site, you can use the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console to efficiently evaluate your site’s overall performance.
Aside from providing high-quality content, one of your SEO priorities should also be to make your website design in Miami more user-friendly.
The goal is to provide the ultimate web-browsing experience to delight users, win them over, keep them coming back for more, and convert them into customers!
At Digital Resource, our award-winning team of web designers and SEO specialists will work with you to create a custom web design that puts your site on top of the search results.
Want to have a web design that converts? Contact us today!
Think you've got what it takes to hang with the pros at Digital Resource? Check out our Careers page to browse current job openings!
