All I have heard over the last few months is “core web vitals? What is it and how will it affect my website?”. In reality itsounds scarier than it actually is.

We will look at what the next update is, what’s measured in Core Web Vitals, how to test your site, and what to do based on your results. 

I can’t stress this enough and I will say this a few times through this blog post but do not feel bogged down about these updates. 

The best thing you can do for your blog creates good engaging content, but if you do want to improve your core web vitals, do it in small steps. Do not obsess about site speed, it is not the be-all and end-all. So please take your time, grab a snack and don’t rush to learn everything all at once.

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What are Core Web Vitals?

As of June 2021, Google will be updating their ranking signal to include mobile usability, site speed and accessibility. This was originally scheduled for May 2021 but Google has announced that the update will be pushed back until mid June. You can read about why here.

The Core Web Vital update is designed to make you think about how a user sees and navigates your web pages so you can make that experience as good as possible. Google as a service wants to be user-focused so searchers can find the content most appropriate for them.

So content will always be king, however ensuring your site to be as user-friendly as possible will give you a little boost.

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How important are the Core Web Vitals?

I’m sure you’ve probably seen the focus and the hype around site speed recently? If not it is a very popular focus in the blogging and SEO worlds at the moment. This is great, it’s important to have a fast site for both users and search engines.  But, there is so much more that you should be looking at.

If you’ve been blogging for a while you are probably aware of the SEO basics? 

• Completing keyword research
• Creating great content
• Building backlinks to your website

Site speed is rarely the reason that you aren’t seeing the rankings and traffic you’d like. What I’m saying is yes, site speed is good to be fast with however it isn’t the end of the world. 

Well written content will always do better. Google cares more about quality. I promise you, if you don’t understand core web vitals it’s ok and it’s not the end of the world for your blog. You can and will still do great. This isn’t just me saying so – Google says this too.

“While page experience is important, Google still seeks to rank pages with the best information overall, even if the page experience is subpar. A great page experience doesn’t override having great page content. However, in cases where there are many pages that may be similar in relevance, page experience can be much more important for visibility in Search.”
– Google

This post’s main objective to educate and to fight against the fear mongering going around about the Core Web Vital update.

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What factors are included in Core Web Vitals?

Speed can vary a lot depending on the user, what’s happening on the site at the time it’s tested, what variable scripts (i.e. ads) are loaded, your personal internet speed, how well the site is optimized, and so on.

Google has selected a range of metrics to use in Core Web Vitals from May onwards:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
• Total Blocking Time (TBT) and First Input Delay (FID)

Let’s take a look at these.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Largest Contentful Paint is the point where the majority of the main content on your page has loaded. Google says that this should be lower than 4 seconds (and ideally lower than 2.5 seconds wherever possible, but that’s easier said than done).

LCP is important because it indicates to the visitor that the page is actually loading; most visitors will start to engage with a page as soon as they can, rather than waiting till the page is fully loaded.

What does Google consider a good LCP score?

• Good: 2.5 seconds or less
• Needs improvement: 4 seconds or less
• Poor: More than 4 seconds

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Cumulative Layout Shift is how much your page jumps around while it’s loading. For example, space these take up should be accounted for rather than the text jumping around the page as images are suddenly loaded in.  You see this quite a lot on sites that are not optimised for various devices.

We’ve all been on a website at least once where there has been a shift midway through reading and you lose your place. It’s annoyed and creates a bad user experience, which is exactly why Google is trying to make this less of a thing.

If we’re looking at CLS issues on blogs, the most common cause of bad CLS scores are poorly lazy loaded images or adverts. There are loads of image optimisation plugins which offer lazy loading these days, and they handle it quite well, but if you want to improve your CLS score, that could be the first thing to look at.

What does Google consider a good CLS score?

Unlike the other Core Web Vitals metrics, CLS isn’t based on seconds or milliseconds. Instead, Google rates CLS based on their own system, where 0 means no content shifting on the page and 1 means maximum shifting:

• Good: 0.1 or less
• Needs improvement: 0.25 or less
• Poor: Over 0.25

First Input Delay (FID) and Total Blocking Time (TBT)

These are very similar metrics, but TBT is a ‘lab’ metric (i.e. tests you’re running on demand) and FID is only measured as a ‘field’ metric (i.e. data aggregated over time from users visiting your site). 

This is the time difference between a visitor interacting with your page i.e. clicking a link and the browser responding i.e. opening the link. Continuous actions such as scrolling does not count towards FID or TBT.

If a user does not interact with your site that’s relevant to FID, they will provide no FID value. 

It’s also important to know that some users’ first interaction will be when your page is still loading things behind the scenes (more likely to result in a high FID) while other visitors’ first interaction will be after your page has loaded everything (more likely to result in a low FID). 

Simply put it is better to not to get too wrapped up in the numbers for FID, especially if you don’t have many visitors to your site. There are lots of factors that skew the results you will get.

What does Google consider a good TBT/FID score?

• Good: 100ms or less
• Needs improvement: 100ms-300ms
• Poor: More than 300ms

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How to check your Core Web Vitals scores

You can see your scores in speed tools and reports such as PageSpeed Insights, Google Search Console, WebPageTest.org and GTMetrix. 

There are loads of other tools out there these days, I’d be wary of any that charge you a fee to check these vitals. Google provides this data for free with various tools.

As Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics created by Google, ideally you would want to assess it using one of their own tools. However there isn’t a perfect tool out there. You might find it beneficial to use more than one tool.

Google Search Console can be great – it gives you indepth signals but it only updates every 28 days so you will have to wait to see how your changes will be received. It also gives you a Core Web Vitals report once a month. I think this is best data to use but also it’s painful to wait for it. 

PageSpeed Insights is generally a good tool but I recommend taking it with a pinch of salt. It will give you a clear-ish idea, however your internet speed, how many tabs you have open, your plug-ins and whether you are using incognito mode or not will affect the results you get. 

If you do use page speed insights, I recommend running the audit a minimum of three times and working out an average score as it’s likely your results will vary.

Google Search Console also now has the page experience tool which combines the core web vitals report with other metrics like site speed.

Google Lighthouse is my go to tool. I always like to do this incognito mode on Chrome, it’s accessed by inspecting the page and it’ll assess the opened page as a whole. 

Core Web Vitals scores will display in your speed test results after entering your URL; you just need to look for “LCP,” “CLS” and either “FID” or “TBT” and grab the numbers from next to them. 

Mobile testing on page speed insights is done on a slow 3G connection, so don’t panic if you see some numbers you don’t like the look of. The majority of the world has faster internet speeds than a 3G connection these days.

Don’t be concerned if you run the test and get lots of reds and oranges.  Grades and colours are not everything. 

Some notes on speed testing tools and Core Web Vitals

• In waterfall testing tools such as WebPageTest,  FID is likely to be referred to as TBT.
• In Google tools, each Core Web Vitals metric is given a status: Good (green), Needs Improvement (yellow) or Poor (red). 
• For Google Search Console, if there isn’t enough reporting data for a metric/URL, it’s left out of the report.

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What to focus on to improve Core Web Vitals

To improve your Core Web Vitals scores, there are three main areas you may want to focus on. These are:

• Reducing your page size
• Reducing the number of page requests
• Reducing your Time To First Byte (TTFB)

Let’s look at what these are.

Reducing Your Page Size (Helps your LCP and FID/TBT scores)

Everything you add to your page, i.e. images, ads, videos,etc. It all increases your page size. 

Your blog content i.e. the text only adds a very tiny amount to your page size, so don’t worry about that. For an average WordPress blog, your page size should be under 2MB (you can check your page size using WebPageTest.org), as a general rule, the smaller is always better. 

Reducing your page requests (Helps your LCP and FID/TBT scores)

Page Requests are all the files and scripts your page is asking for like Google Fonts, images, iframes, etc.

An external request is when your website asks another website for something, for example loading an advert from an ad network.

Internal requests are typically things like you adding an image from your media library to your page; your page still has to search for it and find it to display it. All requests add to the total page request time regardless of whether they’re internal or external. 

Reducing your TTFB (Time To First Byte)

TTFB, also known as “Time To First Byte”, is the time it takes for the server to return the first byte of data for your page, i.e. the soonest possible moment your page can start loading. This element of your site speed correlates to your web hosting, caching and theme. It’s not all in your control with this one. 

If you’re struggling with this, most hosting providers offer help, so it may be worth reaching out to them.

What about CLS?

Ok, so yes this is a pretty big you but you may have noticed that CLS isn’t mentioned at all above. This is for two reasons: it’s not directly a speed metric, and it’s generally pretty easy to improve your score (if needed) using the tasks mentioned in our checklist below.

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Core Web Vitals Checklist

Next to each action is a key to tell you which Web Vitals metrics (LCP, CLS and/or FID/TBT) can be improved by completing that action.  

• Proper image optimization
  Reduces page size and helps LCP, FID/TBT 
  • Generally, the biggest culprits of page size are large images. This is often an issue for people who upload images straight from their phones, but even if you don’t, one image you’ve forgotten to optimize can massively increase your page size.  
  • I have written a whole blog post on how you can optimise your images.
• Remove unnecessary images and media from pages
  Reduces page requests and page size, helps LCP, FID/TBT
  • Remove images that you don’t really need from your posts and pages helps both page size and requests, resulting in a faster website. Sometimes I look at a blog post and just think whether the images I have used actually add anything to the blog post. If they don’t, I get rid.
  • Even if they’re small and well-optimized, having lots on one page will add up and reduce your page speed. 
• Make site-wide reductions
  Reduces page size and helps LCP, FID/TBT
  • Check your header, footer, and sidebar to see if you can remove any unneeded images or widgets. Even if you can only remove or reduce one or two things, this can make every page on your site a little faster so it’s worth considering.
  • I’ve recently been using Hummingbird to move less important code to the footer. If it’s not needed for when a user first comes to the site, it needs moving or removing.
• Minify and combine code (CSS & JavaScript)
  Reduces page size, page requests and helps LCP, FID/TBT
  • There are some great WordPress Plugins that can do this, I’ve used both Hummingbird and Autoptimize in the past. 
  • Combining your JavaScript can sometimes break your website, so check your site in a new browser after enabling it to make sure it still works. If it doesn’t, disable it again, and raise a support ticket with your hosting provider. 
  • Or if you have the option to restore a previous version of your site. Only do this if you know your site has backed up the most recent posts.
  • Move certain aspects of your JavaScript to the footer. If you don’t need it to load instantly it can help by setting it to load later. 
• Audit your plugins
  Reduces page requests and helps LCP, FID/TBT
  • Make sure you only have plugins you really need, if you decide to stop using one make sure you uninstall it right away. 
  • If your test results show a lot of requests from one particular plugin. You may want to switch it out or remove it completely.
• Remove Jetpack
  Reduces FID/TBT
  • Jetpack is a plugin created by WordPress, If your site is self-hosted it is notorious for slowing down your page speed.
  • If you do choose to remove this ensure you have Google Analytics set up beforehand so you can continue to monitor your traffic.
• Check Caching
  Reduces TTFB and helps LCP
  • Non-existent or wrongly configured caching can be a big problem. Always talk to your host before installing any caching plugin, as they may already have recommendations that work great with their service!
  • Lyrical Host (aff link) set me up with StackCache! Which has been great!
• Check advert requests
  Reduces page requests and helps LCP, FID/TBT
  • If you don’t have display ads (such as Google Adsense), you don’t need to worry about this and can move on. 
  • If your speed test shows a high number of requests from your ad network, it’ll become a problem for your site speed. 
  • You can either speak directly with your ad provider about this or just remove them from your site.
• Optimize your database
  Reduces TTFB and helps LCP
  • The easiest way to do this is by using a plugin like WP Optimize. Simply install, run, and deactivate again once you are done with it. 
• Check lazy-loaded images and ads
  Affects CLS and LCP
  • Bad lazy loading can increase your CLS score; good lazy loading can improve your LCP. If you manually write the code for images, make sure you specify the height and width for them to avoid increasing your CLS.  You can find loads of great information on web.dev
  • Some people don’t like this plugin but I’ve been using Smush and have not had any issues with it as of yet. There are loads of plugins that do this, just make sure you do your research to find the one which best suits your blog.

Conclusion

I know this all sounds like a lot, but I promise you that this update isn’t as big of a deal as it sounds. They’ve said themselves that the update will be coming out in may but won’t immediately affect most sites.

The best thing you can do for your blog, is to continue to create and share your incredible content. I can’t stress enough that this isn’t something you should feel bogged down about. 

I really hope you have found this helpful, and as per usual if you have any questions at all please drop me a line. 

A note for businesses. 
This blog post is aimed specifically at bloggers who do not have the means of that many businesses and companies have. There is a lot of overlap with the issues you would face however there are additional concerns that you may face.

Bloggers tend to use platforms that are more accessible like WordPress, Blogger, Wix and Squarespace. Many companies use custom CMS or more complex platforms, this is one of many reasons why my advice would be different.  Ecommerce platforms also bring additional issues. 

Rather than trying to fix these issues yourself, if you have the budget I recommend hiring a dedicated SEO professional.

If you are looking to hire a professional please get in touch and I will pass on your details.

If you enjoyed this blog post why not check out these key articles about SEO!
A beginners guide to SEO
How to optimise your Images for SEO
A simple guide to meta data