Your website is a crucial part of your business. Not only does it provide information to customers, but it also serves as a virtual storefront for you and your business.
Because of this, you want your website to be fast and easy to use. To do that, you need to have “core web vitals” that are optimized for performance.
In this article, we’ll explain what these core web vitals are so that you can improve them on your website today!
What is Core Web Vitals?
Core web vitals are essential elements of a website. They are critical for measuring how quickly and efficiently your website loads and can be used to determine if there is room for improvement.
- Page load time
- Page size
- Number of HTTP requests (should be less than 6)
- Time to First Byte (TTFB) (should be less than 400ms)
- Time to First Paint/First Meaningful Paint/First Interactive (for content-heavy sites, these timings should be within 3 seconds each)
Understand Your Core Web Vitals
The core web vitals for your website are the most critical factors that affect your website’s performance. Therefore, its ability to achieve business goals. These are elements like:
- Landing page load speed
- Bounce rate (how many visitors leave after viewing one page)
- Time on site (time spent by visitors on your site before leaving or returning)
Optimize your images
- Optimize your images.
Optimizing website images is important because it makes your website load faster and reduces the amount of data transfer required to display the page, resulting in faster page loading time for users and less bandwidth usage on both sides. There are several ways you can go about optimizing your images:
- Use a tool such as ImageOptim or TinyPNG to compress them. These tools will remove unnecessary bytes without sacrificing image quality so that your images look sharp when displayed on any device.
When you optimize an image, make sure that you keep its file name and extension unchanged so that it maintains its original format (for example, .png).
If you change these details, people using older browsers may not see the optimized version of your photo at all!
- Use CSS background gradients instead of full-resolution images whenever possible; they’re much lighter than full-resolution pictures but still look great!
Use browser caching
Browser caching is a technique that saves bandwidth and server resources by saving resource files (such as CSS, JavaScript, and images) on the visitor’s computer. If you change one of your site’s resources, it will only have to be downloaded once.
Browser caching is built into modern browsers and can significantly speed up your website load time. However, it’s not a silver bullet for improving performance. It won’t work for all types of content on your site (such as video), nor does it work well with a dynamic range that frequently changes, such as news sites or blogs (unless you want outdated content).
Browser caching should be used alongside server-side caching such as Varnish or Nginx. This way, each server will cache its unique version of each page rather than relying solely on browser-level methods, which are adequate but not perfect.
Minify and Combine Files
Minification is a process of reducing the size of JavaScript and CSS files. It involves removing unnecessary white spaces, comments, and things that aren’t necessary for the browser to read your code.
The combination is combining multiple small files into one big file. It is done so that your web page doesn’t have to download many different small files at once. That speeds up page load times and reduces HTTP requests (by combining them).
Benefits: Minified/combined code often has faster execution times because fewer characters are transferred between client and server for each file. This can lead to reduced load time compared with non-minified/combined versions of those duplicate files on sites where all three criteria apply simultaneously.
Defer unused CSS and JavaScript
Deferring unused CSS and JavaScript can be a great way to improve your website’s UX. When you delay new CSS, the styles will only load after rendering the page.
This can speed up the loading time of your website because it will decrease the amount of data that has to be downloaded from the server.
Deferring JavaScript is similar. In this case, however, delaying means not loading any scripts until they are needed by the user (i.e., when they click on an element).
In addition to improving performance, this can also help reduce bandwidth usage by as much as half.
Make use of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a Google-designed format for faster loading web pages on mobile devices. AMP speeds up your website by optimizing HTML and CSS, reducing the number of requests made to load content. It also caches assets to allow them to be used offline.
AMP is great because it lets you customize your website so that it’s quick to load no matter what device someone uses to access it.
You can also provide users with an enhanced experience by offering them relevant, fast-loading personalized content based on what they’ve done before or where they’re currently located.
A website with good core web vitals is a website that is not only fast but also user-friendly and engaging
Core web vitals are the critical metrics for measuring a website’s performance. They are typically measured by tools such as Pingdom and GTmetrix.
These core web vitals include:
- Time to First Byte (TTFB) – This is the time it takes for your server to respond to a request after receiving it.
- Page Load Time – This is how long it takes for all of your page’s elements to load completely, not just when the browser has downloaded them but also when they’re ready for user consumption. In other words, if you have an image that took 30 seconds to load, but then there are another 8 seconds before all other content on your page renders without errors or stalls, then that means you had 40 seconds of total page load time instead of just 30 seconds.
Conclusion
These are just a few ways to optimize your website for speed. There are many other ways, but these tips will help you improve your site’s core web vitals.
