Did you know that Google Webmasters have a new service to check your website’s overall health? It’s called Core Web Vitals, and it’s the best way to determine if there are any technical problems with your website. If an SEO company tells you that they are proficient at technical SEO, then one of the first things they should be able to do is analyze your web vitals.
Google wants fast-loading speed for all websites because their studies show that users do not like slow-loading sites. This means built-in components of your page – whether it is images or other elements, must load quickly on the user’s device. And how does Google know whether something loads quickly? Because every time a user types in a keyword into Google, Google checks your website’s speed as one of their many ranking factors.
Why do Google Core Web Vitals matter to all businesses?
With Google Core Web Vitals, you can easily see if there are any problems with your website’s load speed. This is very important because it directly affects your SEO and in turn, reduces traffic to your site.
According to Google: “Page speed is a ranking factor for websites in mobile search results so every second counts!” The faster the page loads, the higher you’ll rank on Google’s SERP. And when users see fast-loading websites, they will be happy customers and more likely to come back and visit again. Thus, keeping an eye on your website’s Google Core Web Vitals is not only important for SEO reasons, but it is also a way to ensure that users will enjoy their visit and be more engaged on your website. On this note, let’s have a look at tips to improve the overall Google Core Web Vitals and drive more traction to your business.
Reduce JavaScript (JS) execution
JavaScript is often the number one cause of slow-loading speed for most websites. JavaScript files are used to support all kinds of dynamic web page elements, including animated bar charts and slide shows – not just interactive forms on your website. So, every time a page loads, there are several seconds wasted as each file executes its code (this is especially true for older browsers).
Some JS files can even take up over 100 KB before they start executing. To give you an idea about how big this really is, if your site has 200 pages at 50 KB per page load – that means 5 MB of data needs to be downloaded for each visit! That is way too much overhead for something like CSS or JS scripts.
Accordingly, try to reduce the number of JS files on your site by combining scripts so that there is only one script. You can also minify them – which means, convert them into a smaller file size. This is done by getting rid of all unnecessary data in the code (like extra spaces and line breaks).
Implement lazy loading
Make sure that images and other heavy media load on a lazy basis. In other words, do not load it at the same time as your HTML content. Otherwise, you will have slow-loading times for each of your pages because they both need to be downloaded simultaneously.
Instead, use a dynamic script or a preloaded to queue a single request – especially if there is more than one file located at different levels in the directory hierarchy (if you had /images/background1.jpg and /images/background2.jpg each containing 10 KB, then this would take 20 KB total before even displaying “hello world”).
Implement effective caching
Caching allows your web servers to deliver web pages by storing commonly requested files locally. For example, when a user requests a web page you can check for a cached version. If the file is available locally, then it will load from this cache and save your servers from doing too much work so that your website’s speed will not be affected. There should always be an up-to-date copy of the most critical files on your server to ensure quick access to them.
Use asynchronous scripts
This should be used in conjunction with lazy loading. Asynchronous script tags instruct browsers to execute code without waiting for other parts of a page to load first – using a callback function after all files have been downloaded, executed and rendered correctly by the browser. This allows scripts to download in parallel instead of sequentially, which makes for faster page loading times.
Use Javascript to defer parsing
With HTML5, you can indicate that a script should be deferred (and thus parsed asynchronously) and executed after the browser has dealt with all the elements in your document. To do this, you simply place an attribute in the opening <script> tag called “defer” which will tell the browser not to block other parts of your page when it runs.
This is especially useful when scripts are large or might delay other downloads on your site because browsers are good at parsing HTML content but not JS code. So by only including what’s necessary for rendering your homepage, you can reduce render-blocking assets drastically without affecting SEO rankings negatively.
Wrapping up!
Google’s Core Web Vitals is one of the most important things that you should pay attention to on your website. These technical aspects might not seem like much on their own but can seriously affect your website’s overall speed and performance. Thus, it helps a lot to improve these core web vitals for your site – as Google will give preference to websites with fast-loading times.
