7 Ways to Start Optimizing Your Ecommerce Website for Core Web Vitals

Google’s ranking system is made up of algorithms. This algorithm helps Google to show the most relevant results of the user’s search query.

Google Page Experience is a part of Google’s algorithm for search engine rankings. Google has delayed the Core Web Vitals rollout which was scheduled for May 2021. Now the update will roll out in June and will be fully live by August 2021.

If you have been regularly practicing SEO for your website, you need to worry about the new update. The delay in the page experience update means you can stay up-to-date with the latest updates. If you have not started updating your website, you have time to meet the requisites.

Go ahead with the article to discover Core Web Vitals and optimize your website for it. Alternatively, you can avail the Search Engine Optimization Service from the team that is strengthened with the latest digital practices to increase your website traffic and rankings.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are a set of specific factors that Google considers crucial for a webpage’s overall user experience. Google Core Web Vitals are made up of three major metrics:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – It shows how speedy the webpage loads. To provide a better user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds when the page first starts loading.

• First Input Delay (FID) – It is about the interactivity and engagement of your webpage. In order to increase the user experience, FID must not exceed 100 milliseconds.

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – It measures the stability of the elements on your webpage. For a better user experience, the CLS score must be 0.1 or less.

Image Source: Search Engine Journal

So, Core Web Vitals focuses on loading speed, interactivity, and page stability. This gives you the outline to you and your developers to start working on your website to meet the metrics.

Now, you know the fundamentals of Core Web Vitals, here are the 7 Ways to Start Optimizing Your Ecommerce Website for Core Web Vitals.

7 Ways to Start Optimizing Your Ecommerce Website for Core Web Vitals

1. Optimize Images and Videos

Slow loading pages can cost you, potential customers. For every website, images are the largest element of view so it is necessary to optimize them.

An efficient way to optimize images is to compress and scale images on your website. Tools like tinyPNG can be used for image optimization. You can also convert images to advanced formats like WebP and PNG. Make sure your images are responsive for desktop as well as mobile views.

Be clear about “optimization” and “size reduction” of images. To load images faster, you cannot cut the size of the image as it will affect the quality. Remember the Core Web Vitals focuses on user experience. Images may load faster but blurry and low-quality images will give a bad user experience. 

2. Try Lazy Load Images

Lazy Loading is another option to make your website quicker and load faster. As the user scrolls down the page, lazy loading images load subsequently. If the user is on top of the page, all the images that the user is supposed to see will load first then as the user scrolls down, others images will follow.

Lazy loading images are essential for websites with heavy images. You can follow this code,

<img src=”myimage.jpg” loading=”lazy” alt=”…” />

<iframe src=”content.html” loading=”lazy”></iframe>

3. Ensure All Elements are in place

Google Core Web Vitals considers CLS to ensure elements are in the proper place. When an element shifts, a callback function is invoked that is added to the existing layout score.

Chrome DevTools will help to ensure if the elements are in place. It shows you the elements that are moved but not why it’s shifting.

You can use the CSS aspect ratio to allocate space for images and other elements. This way the page reserves space for the elements without shifting other elements.

Layout shift is only considered when it is visible to the user. If the user is yet to scroll down the page, it is not considered against CLS.

4. Fix User Experience

Many layout shifts lead to a bad user experience. One example of it can be popups or banners appearing on website pages. It may happen when pop-ups appear on top, it shifts all the other elements down.

Reserve enough space for dynamic elements like popups, promos, or ads. It is a good practice not to insert dynamic content above the existing content to avoid shifting of elements. 

5. Increase Real User Monitoring

Real User Monitoring (RUM) is the process of supervising the movement of every user on the website. It is also known as real-user metrics or end-user experience monitoring.

Google Search Console is a powerful tool that will help you to know the performance of your website pages.

Monitoring performance will help you to know the interactivity and positive response of first-time visitors.

6. Improve server response time

Server response time is another factor that can affect your website performance. Faster server response time will help to improve the single page load metric.

The browser quickly receives content from the server, it will show on screen and the user will be able to interact with it.

If the report says you need to reduce the initial server response time, you need to contact your web developers to fix the issue.

7. Stay Relevant with your Content

Visitors love relevant content. Make sure you post genuine content because otherwise, Google will penalize you. And this will cost you very high.

Create engaging posts and images to increase the user-friendliness of your store. Core Web Vitals rankings consider the page that is more engaging and interactive.

Google Core Web Vitals Report

In Search Console, website owners can find a new Core Web Vitals Report to evaluate pages across the site. 

Google’s Core Web Vitals Report shows how your page performs based on real-world users. The Core Web Vitals Report shows the metrics of URL performance. This report is based on 3 metrics: LCP, FID, and CLS. It shows status as Good, Needs Improvement, or Poor on URL.

You can measure the Core Web Vitals score with all the Google Tools. 

Image Source: Google

Looking at the Google Core Web Vitals report you can fix the poor experience of your website for higher rankings.

Wrap-up

The Core Web Vitals are designed for users to enjoy their web experience. This update focuses on site speed and user experience. However, there is no such optimization trick to make your website the best, but with relevancy and higher performance, you can definitely achieve good results.

Remember – Better Website Performance leads to Superior User Experience and Improved Ranking.

These updates ensure that the web believes in quality websites. Make sure you apply best practices to deliver a great user experience.