To help business owners prepare for the upcoming Page Experience update, 1SEO Digital Agency’s search engine optimization experts wanted to share some practical, actionable tips to help improve your site’s Core Web Vitals score on Google PageSpeed Insights as we gear up for the Page Experience algorithm to roll out this summer.
As defined by Google, “Core Web Vitals are a set of real-world, user-centered metrics that quantify key aspects of the user experience. They measure dimensions of web usability such as load time, interactivity, and the stability of content as it loads.”
As noted by Google and seen in the three examples above, the primary focus of core web vitals is to ensure your website loads quickly, functions properly, and is visually stable to create the optimal end-user experience.
In our previous blog, we break down everything you need to know about the Google Page Experience algorithm update launching between June and August 2021. Today, we’re going to take a deep dive into Core Web Vitals and help you build a checklist of action items to ensure your website’s technical SEO is up to snuff and fully optimized for the incoming update.
Ask yourself this quick question. When was the last time you visited a website without any images on it? If a recent instance comes to mind, we’re confident that you likely didn’t stay on that site very long, sifting through pages of text to find what you were looking for, right?
When it comes to core web vitals, website image optimization remains one of the most influential factors when it comes to appeasing Google’s bots as well as the experience of end-users. In fact, all of the web vitals measure initial rendering in some capacity, and loading of images is often the primary source of delay before a web page is initially fully loaded. For an easy win in the PageSpeed Insights score, you’ll want to optimize the images on your site to improve your core web vitals.
CSS, which stands for Cascading Style Sheet, is a type of rule-based computer language and one of the cornerstone technologies of the web responsible for the layout and structure of web pages. With the proper CSS setup, you can save yourself and the bots crawling your site a lot of work in controlling multiple elements of your site’s web pages at once while making it look more appealing in the process for end-users.
As you work to improve your Core Web Vitals score, optimize your site code to ensure it’s as clean and consolidated as possible, and remember that just because something is easier as a developer, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re making things faster or creating a better experience for your end users.
Another programming language leveraged to create interactive effects within web browsers is JavaScript. Though crucial to a modern site, JavaScript is often responsible for delay when a website is loading. Through strategic optimization of your JavaScript, you can quickly speed up website load times.
No matter how many aspects of your site get optimized, your efforts are futile if your server is slow. As the web hosting industry continues to progress and web technologies advance, you should consider upgrading to a faster hosting infrastructure to keep your site ahead of the curve.
In 2021, WordPress is regarded as one of the easiest and most popular ways for businesses to build their website. To extend the functionality of your WordPress site, you can add plugins which are simply pieces of software that integrate with WordPress to add new features to your site to improve the overall experience of visitors. Although there are nearly 50,000 different plugins available for WordPress, here is our list you can implement to improve your site’s core web vitals score.
As a business owner, you need to take a step back and evaluate your antiquated website as a whole. If you’re working through the elements of Google’s Core Web Vitals checklist and discover that there are so many needed changes that it doesn’t seem realistic or manageable, perhaps it’s time to consider a new website build altogether.
As one of the nation’s leading digital marketing and web development firms and a Google Premier Partner, 1SEO Digital Agency’s experts are at the forefront of technical SEO and are ready and willing to provide you with a comprehensive audit of your website before the Page Experience update in August 2021. Reach out to our team to schedule your free website assessment today.
To reiterate, Google’s Core Web Vitals report breaks down your website’s performance score based on three primary factors:
These metrics focus primarily on the overall experience your website creates for end-users. With Google’s Page Experience algorithm update rolling out towards the tail end of 2021, website owners need to be taking a series of steps to ensure the best possible on-page experience for everyone who visits.
Here are some areas of optimization where you can score some quick wins for your website:
Casey Quinn
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