Increasing Your Core Web Vitals Score
Follow these simple steps to improve your site’s technical health.
Google introduced a new subset of metrics for evaluating user experience (UX), the Core Web Vitals. The Core Web Vitals are designed to gauge the technical performance of web pages based on three elements: load time, interactivity, and visual stability. These added metrics focus on the technical facets of page experience, which, according to Google, are just as important as content quality.
How To Measure Core Web Vitals
To increase your Core Web Vitals score, you must first make an accurate diagnosis of your current page performance. There are a handful of tools that you can use to assess the technical status of your web pages. Here are some of the most common ones:
Google Search Console
The Google Search Console examines the performance of web pages on both desktop and mobile. It offers insights into how they perform based on impressions, traffic, clicks, and other metrics. Aside from creating abbreviated reports on performance, the Google Search Console also generates recommendations for site improvement.
PageSpeed Insights
The PageSpeed Insights provides diagnostic information on web performance. It generates comprehensive assessments of websites based on lab and field data. This free tool provides audits of web pages and generates detailed results on selected metrics. The PageSpeed Insights also provides suggestions for improving performance based on specific benchmarks.
AMP Page Experience Guide
The AMP Page Experience Guide is used to ensure accelerated mobile pages (AMP) meet Google’s page experience signals, which include the Core Web Vitals. This tool aims to provide actionable insights for optimizing your web pages for mobile use. Similar to PageSpeed Insights, the AMP Page Experience Guide uses lab and field data to generate diagnostic reports.
How to Boost Core Web Vitals
Once you’ve identified the key problems on your web pages, it’s time to make some adjustments. While it might seem like a complicated process, there are simple strategies that can help you optimize your web pages based on the Core Web Vitals.
Use Caching Servers
Utilize caching servers such as Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to speed up the load time of web pages. These solutions collect cached versions of content on web pages in order to deliver them to users as soon as they’re requested. This reduces users' waiting time and improves their overall experience with the website. In fact, because of their enormous boost to site performance, CDNs are expected to accommodate 72% of global internet traffic this year. So if you’re looking to improve your Core Web Vitals, these solutions are indeed worthwhile investments.
Conduct Code Splitting
Improve the performance of your website through code splitting, the process of grouping code into bundles to increase load time of web pages. This technique is a form of load prioritization, which can increase the technical performance of websites since requests are sent per group, not per module. No doubt, integrating code splitting can be a big boost to your technical performance, as well as Core Web Vitals score.
Limit Presence of Scripts
Reduce the number of third-party scripts on your web pages to increase your Core Web Vitals. Excessive scripts can interfere with response times between networks and even the rendering process of site components. So limit third-party scripts to avoid issues with your technical performance. In addition, you can delay the execution of third-party scripts to increase the load time of web pages. This helps elements and modules to load as soon as the user arrives on your web page, instead of waiting for all the components to finish loading.
Practice Lazy Loading
Implement lazy loading, the process of delaying the execution of non-critical elements on web pages. This technique minimizes the rendering path of code onto the screen and enables a shorter load time, which is best for web pages with image-heavy content. Aside from reducing load time, lazy loading also reduces the bandwidth consumption of users. If you want to improve the overall visitor experience and see an improvement in your Core Web Vitals, start exploring different methods of integrating this approach.