Core Web Vitals: Why And How Are They Relevant For WordPress

If you’ve heard about the Web Vitals of Google, then the chances are that you’re interested in how your WordPress page connects to it. Or perhaps you have little to no idea of what the project is all about and why it matters for the aforementioned digital platform. Whatever the case may be, we’ll cover everything you need to know about CWV and how it affects WordPress.

We’ll also talk about strategies and practices on how to elevate the score of your website so that you can improve your search rankings and user experience. Continue reading to learn more.

Core Web Vitals: What are they?

In a nutshell, Google’s Core Web Vitals or CWVs are new initiatives designed to measure users’ experience when browsing the Web and improve upon it. Rather than concentrating solely on standard metrics, such as how fast an online domain loads, it focuses on the website’s overall performance and ability to deliver a top-quality experience for users. After all, people care more about the speed at which they can begin interacting with Web pages, and this is what CWV aims to determine and measure.

At the moment, three primary areas contribute to the Google Page Experience. The first one is the Largest Contentful Paint or LCP, which refers to the site’s loading performance. Secondly, you have the Cumulative Layout Shift or CLS that focuses on its visual stability. Last but not least is the First Input Delay or FID, which is all about the page’s interactivity. Based on Google’s determination, these three are the metrics that contribute to the user’s experience.

How is it relevant to WordPress?

Every online domain owner aspires to rank high in the search results, and WordPress pages are no exception. Since Google will use the CWVs as ranking factors once it's rolled out, they may have a considerable impact on the performance of your search engine optimization efforts. Apart from being an element of the signals for page experience alongside safe-browsing, HTTPS security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines, it will also affect your desktop and mobile organic results.

In other words, meeting the CWV metrics is essential in enhancing your organic ranking. So if you want to maximize the performance of your SEO, you’ll need to give the CWVs the attention that they deserve by hiring a CWV expert or working with an SEO agency.

Tips to enhance CWV on WordPress

Now that we’ve established what the Core Web Vitals are and how they affect WordPress, the next step is to answer the question of how to optimize your website in a way that will improve your CWV score. Each strategy is different for every metric, and we’ll discuss some that will enable you to achieve the desired outcome.

• Optimize the website’s content. Speed plays a critical role in the CWVs. If you want to get a higher score, you’ll need to ensure that your website loads quickly, and one way to do it is by optimizing its content. From images to videos, ensuring that they’re optimized will go a long way. You’ll also want to modify the code for efficiency and remove unnecessary JavaScript or CSS files while you’re at it to speed up its loading even more.
• Add dimensions to the elements of the site. It’s a general rule of thumb to add dimensions to images, ads, embeds, and other aspects of the site. After all, without it, there’s a chance that the content may shift around when loading, which can impact user experience.
• Incorporate a menu on every page. It can be inconvenient for users to back out of every page whenever they want to make a new selection. Instead, it makes sense to incorporate a menu of all available links on every page. In this way, they can choose where they want to go next, regardless of what page they’re on.

Conclusion

It’s crucial to optimize your WordPress website based on the Core Web Vitals that Google has established. When you get right down to it, doing so won’t just help you keep your visitors engaged with your content. But it will enable your site to attract more users since it’s likely to show up much higher on search results than it otherwise would have.