How to Ace Your Core Web Vitals:
A Comprehensive Guide on the Technical Dimensions of SEO
When creating a website the primary focus of the digital marketer is to generate traffic to the site—an objective that can be accomplished through organic means. This process, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), largely involves enhancing a website’s content in order to improve its ranking in a search result, consequently driving more visitors to the page. However, there is a more technical aspect to this method that achieves these same results but focuses primarily on improving a website’s security and accessibility. The Core Web Vitals, created by Google, establishes three core metrics that the search engine measures in order to determine the site’s rankability.
THE THREE CORE METRICS
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
This measures how fast the site's largest content piece---could be an image, video, etc---takes to load. The optimum time is 2.5 seconds or less.
Interaction To Next Paint (INP)
This measures how long it takes a website to respond when a user taps or clicks a key. The desired INP is less than 200 milliseconds.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
The CLS measure how much visible content moves while a page loads. A shift that occurs within 500 milliseconds of an action does not count.
How Do I Optimize My Core Web Vitals?
According to Google, these three metrics are marked on a score ranging from: good, needs improvement, and poor. As previously established, an LCP that loads under 2.5 seconds or less is great, however, one that takes 4.0 seconds or more to load needs improvement and/or is considered poor in performance. The main reason behind this lag is most probably due to the hosting provider of the website, which controls the speed at which your site reacts. Luckily, a content delivery network (CDN) offers a solution to this problem. Essentially, this global network of servers will store a copy of the largest content of the page and load it onto a data center closer to your location, allowing it to load faster.
Interaction To Next Paint (INP)
A site that loads in 500 milliseconds or more after an action occurs is considered poor performance. The underlying cause behind this issue is more often than not JavaScript tasks. When a task—a piece of programmed code—takes longer than 50 milliseconds to execute it is considered a “long” task. This causes the site to lag because it is trying to both respond to the user’s actions (clicks, scroll, tapping) and complete the programmed code. A quick solution to this is break the script into smaller chunks and remove unnecessary coding.
How Can I Find My Score?
The easiest way to find your Core Web Vitals score is through a free program offered by Google to test your technical SEO performance.