A Digital Marketer’s Guide To Core Web Vitals

When you’re a digital marketer, a good user experience is a critical part of your platform. You want to ensure that those who visit your website get the best user experience and are motivated to do it more.

What are core web vitals?

Core web vitals refer to a set of metrics introduced by Google to track responsiveness, speed, and pages’ visual stability.

How to improve core web vitals

As the experts at Contentful say, even though creating high-level content will always be the most important factor, a better Core Web Vitals score might give you the edge over a competitor. There are several tips on how to improve Core Web Vitals, and they include;

Reduce the size of background images

There is no denying that background images are a big cause of delay in loading a page. Based on the fact that they are not really necessary for a page design, you might want to reduce their sizes. This will help optimize the speed at which your page loads.

With smaller images, you’re guaranteed that they’ll load immediately without getting the user frustrated.

Implement lazy loading

Lazy loading refers to delaying a section of the page or image until it’s needed. With this technique, your page will load the top content first and the other details later, making your page display even faster.

Use WebP images

Image formats such as PNG are sometimes too big to load and display, thus slowing down your page. However, the newly introduced WebP format makes images a lot smaller and has better compression algorithms.

This makes their application to any page more convenient as they need less time to load.

Use images for video thumbnails

Although videos might be popular for advertising, they’re big files that delay the loading of pages. Many users might not be interested in watching any video on your page, so having it download in the background while they scroll through the page is not needed.

If you have to include any video on your page, ensure that you use an image as a placeholder for the video.

What do core web vitals mean for user experience?

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

This component of core web vitals will measure the loading time of pages. It will mark the point in the load time when the main content was availed to the user.

First Input Delay

It is a measure of interactivity. This element will be measuring how quickly a user can interact with a given page.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

It will track how unexpected ads or images might pop while the user is loading the page leading to the page being pushed further down. It will help measure how often users get a poor user experience as a result of the content shift.

The Bottom Line

By using core web vitals, you can tell the impact of any changes made to your page. It could be in terms of interactivity, loading, or visual stability.