Even if a website looks good, if it takes ages to load and people get annoyed with waiting, or if it just jumps around when users scrolls, essentially you are throwing visitors and money out of the window. Of course, Google is aware of this and for that reason, they have made Core Web Vitals critical ranking factors that directly affect your search visibility.

The better news? Fixing these indicators is not something that only geniuses can do. Let us go through the process of optimizing your Core Web Vitals one by one to see how both your audience and the search engines will benefit from your effort.

Understanding What Actually Matters

Core Web Vitals measure among others the first impression through Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), the responsiveness via Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and the visual stability by cumulative layout shift (Cumulative Layout Shift) of a visitor’s experience on a website.

You can think about it like this: LCP is the first impression, INP is the speed of the reaction, and CLS is the consequence of users’ hitting the wrong buttons due to last second page changes.

Start With a Performance Audit

If the initial step, you have to find out your current status before you make any fixes. Google’s PageSpeed is the place to be for understanding the performance of a URL. Along with various scores for each Core Web Vital, you will be given a list of points you can act on to help your site.

It’s quite normal if your starting points aren’t flawless. The majority of sites can still be improved. There is a performance surprise waiting for you somewhere.

Tackle Your Loading Speed First

Generally, images are what mainly bring your LCP scores down. Besides conversion of images to WebP or any other modern formats, you should also enable lazy loading of your images not in the viewport and always add width and height attributes to your pictures to avoid layout shift.

It is more important than you think, your hosting will make a difference. If you are on cheap shared hosting and your site is loading slowly, you will in most cases see performance improvements straight away if you switch to a better provider. To make delivery of your assets faster consider a content delivery network.

Make Your Site Feel Snappy

INP is short for Interaction to Next Paint, which is the metric that measures how quickly a website responds to a user’s interaction. Typically, the problem is caused by the heavy consumption of JavaScript. Thus, I would like to recommend you through the executed scripts pretty sharp. As an example, is there a necessity for a social media widget that increases each page loading time by 200KB and the overall loading time by 200KB? Furthermore, it would be a good idea to split long JavaScript tasks, postpone non critical script loading and execute less on the main thread since it will make the users think that their interactions are being processed concurrently without any delay.

Lock Down Your Layout

The worst thing that can happen to a user while navigation is clicking a button but then having an ad loaded on the page which shifts the layout down causing the user to hit a different button altogether. One should not allow this to happen by using a CSS box with an aspect ratio for responsive images. Besides setting explicit width and height attributes on the images, ads, and embeds, one can also reserve space for those items.

Sometimes web fonts that you choose can be the reason for the huge layout shifts of your website. If you need the elements to be loaded sooner take a font, consider preloading critical fonts and choose the font display carefully.

Monitor and Maintain

Don’t treat optimization as something that is done once. Monitor your Core Web Vitals over time through Google Search Console by setting up alerts. It is perfectly normal that the performance of a website will gradually worsen with new plugins, theme updates, and other script installations, so a regular checkup will also indicate the health of your site.

The work you put into Core Web Vitals optimization is something that will provide good returns in the form of better rankings, lower bounce rates, and higher conversions. In return, your users will pay you in the form of their attention and money.