Complete Guide to WordPress Core Web Vitals Google (21 Tips)

Have you been working hard to build your WordPress website and maybe installed some useful JavaScript or other recommended tools, but you’re still not getting the traffic you expected? Are you struggling to see your website on the first few Google search engine result pages? What do you know about WordPress core web vitals and their role in ranking your website on Google?

Many factors are happening behind the scenes on your WordPress website, and they could be drastically affecting your WordPress website performance. We’ve compiled this comprehensive list of need-to-know facts about core web vitals, and even put together a list of the 21 most valuable tips to help you revamp your website and get it back to where it belongs. Read on to learn more and discover how radically core web vitals can help change the future of your website.

Table of Contents:

What are WordPress Core Web Vitals?

In 2020, Google introduced core web vitals as a tool to better rank the best websites for users. Core web vitals measure and evaluate your website’s loading speed, reactiveness, and visual stability. The better you score on these valuable factors; the higher your page will rank on Google’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

Web-users care about how quickly they can interact with a page, which is precisely what core web vitals measure. There are currently three core web vitals:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Your site’s loading performance
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Your site’s visual stability
First Input Delay (FID): Your site’s interactivity

It would be beneficial if you took the time to learn and understand these core web vitals. They play an essential role in your WordPress website’s performance. Once you know how your core web vitals are ranking, what the scores mean for your website, and learn how to improve them, you will start to see an improvement in your site ranking and user interactions.

How to Test Your Core Web Vitals Score on WordPress

To check out your core web vitals, you need to input your domain and audit your vitals. Doing this will run a site audit, review all of your core web vitals, provide you with a ranking for each of the major categories, and give you a good baseline to build off.

Running this test will not only give you the rankings but also help you pinpoint where your site may be struggling. For example, you won’t have to wonder if an Ad or image is slowing you down or worry if a JavaScript bundle is hurting performance; you’ll know without a doubt what you can change for the better.

Are Your Core Web Vitals Important?

Google understands that website owners like you want to create a better experience for their users, but it can seem impossible to fix if you don’t know why your website is suffering. By monitoring specific areas and understanding how to resolve any issues you may have, you will be able to create a better website using core web vitals.

Content quality and top-tier core web vitals will help significantly improve your ranking on the SERP (search engine results page). Google will reward websites that take the time to improve their ranking by moving them up in the results list and recommending your website to more people. In order to truly compete with other websites like yours, you need to take the time to understand and improve your website by using your core web vitals metrics.

21 Tips to Improve Your WordPress Core Web Vitals

Now that you know how crucial your core web vitals are, where exactly should you start revamping your WordPress website, and what steps can you take to rebuild your SERP ranking? These helpful 21 tips on improving your core web vitals will give you all the tools you need to not only get you started but help you achieve your goals and lead to your website’s success.

1. Understand Your LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)

Largest Contentful Paint is what measures the loading performance on your webpage. It isn’t directly referring to the page’s loading speed, but rather the perceived loading speed, referring to how long it takes for the user to feel that all the content has been loaded.

There is content on your page that may take longer to load, and your LCP score won’t be affected by that content. The largest contentful paint measures how long it takes to load the first and largest impressionable elements on your website. This element can be an image, a block of text, or an advertisement.

Page load times are scored in stages, so the primary content needs to load quickly. The sooner this content is updated, the better your LCP will be, and the better experience your users have when they visit your website.

2. Understand Your LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)

Ideally, you want to have an LCP score that is below 2.5 seconds. The faster this primary content loads in that first area of the window where users see your web content, the more enjoyable the experience will be for users.

Your Largest Contentful Paint is directly impacted by the featured images or article text that you place in this initial area, so it’s critical that you choose accordingly. While certain images and blocks of text may seem ideal, if your site is taking too long to load, they could be resulting in a negative user experience.

To can improve your LCP score and get it under 2.5 seconds, choose a smaller image that has a smaller file size and quality. If your score is being impacted by text, consider breaking up the content into smaller paragraphs with headers. Additionally, you can:

Preload your LCP image
Compress the image to 85%
Use asset unloading plugins to remove unused JavaScript and CSS
Serve the image from a CDN
Remove the image
Eliminate render-blocking resources
Optimize fonts

3. Understand Your FID (First Input Delay)

First Input Delay measures any visitor’s first impression of your website. While Largest Contentful Paint measures load times, FID focuses on how quickly a user can interact with the content on your website.

The core web vitals metrics will capture a user’s impression of your website’s web pages and determine how long it takes the browser to respond to their interactions. These interactions can be clicks on a link, tapping a button, or using a submission form.

If it takes a long time for a link to become clickable, if they have to wait for a page to load after filling out a form, or if your website lags due to complex loading elements on your website, your FID score will be high.

High FID scores can result in frustrated users who want to move through your website. To earn a good FID score, you need to earn a rating of fewer than 100 milliseconds.

4. Improve Your FID (First Input Delay) Score

Since your First Input Delay score measures the amount of time it takes your website to react after a user clicks on something, it is crucial that you pinpoint what factors could be slowing things down. Visitors to your website want your content, and they want it now, so by monitoring your page loading speed, you’ll have a better idea of where you stand for both mobile and desktop users.

The easiest way to improve your First Input Delay score is to choose a better web hosting or WordPress hosting platform. You can also implement a cache plugin like WP Rocket, which comes with a feature that allows you to optimize your file delivery. You can boost your First Input Delay score by:

Deferring, delaying, or minifying JavaScript
Test to see if combining CSS and Javascript will work
Remove unused Javascript with an unloading plugin
Remove heavy page builders that add extra CSS and JavaScript
Check for issues in cache plugins
Reduce the impact of third-party code
Split large files
Optimize images and animations

5. Understand Your CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)

Cumulative Layout Shift measures any layout shifts a user may experience during the loading of your website. These unexpected shifts happen when different elements on your webpage load out of synch or load on top of existing content, shifting possible reactive elements.

Anytime you have ads, images, videos, fonts, or headers, they will load at different times and can change size dramatically versus the temporary holding spots your webpage design may accommodate. Because of this, a user could potentially click on something they didn’t intend to, which can be annoying and frustrating.

If this shift happens and your user clicks on something else, they could decide to leave your website and search for a more accommodating option. Therefore, to avoid this shift, you want to have a Cumulative Layout Shift score that is less than 0.1 in order to avoid this concern and provide a good user experience.

6. Improve Your CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) Score

Because your Cumulative Layout Shift score is impacted by different elements on your site that are loading slowly, you need to identify any elements that are causing the content on your screen to shift. To fix this, you can access the page speed insight results and expand the ‘Avoid Large Layout Shifts’ tab, highlighting any elements that are causing your layout to shift during page loading.

You can input the width and height dimensions of images, videos, Ads, and other items to fix shifting content during the load. While WordPress generally inputs this data automatically, you can still check to ensure the dimensions are attributed.

To do this, right-click on your browser page and select the Inspect Tool to open the developer data. Then point and click on the different elements on the page to highlight their code to see if the dimensions are defined. To optimize your Cumulative Layout Shift, you can:

Specify all the dimensions for images, videos, Ads, etc.
Host fonts on your local server and test preloading
Use CSS transfer for your animations instead of height and width attributes
Optimize CSS delivery
Delay JavaScript to prevent new content, unless triggered by the user

7. Optimize Your WordPress Hosting Selection

Did you know that your WordPress hosting company plays the most important role in your website performance? Your chosen host is able to optimize their servers for WordPress to ensure your website has the most solid platform for you to build a successful website.

8. Size Down, Relocate, or Defer Image

A significant cause of a lower core web vitals score is very large images on the landing page. Many users on WordPress choose beautiful, high-resolution images to add to their website, but this causes the loading speed to slow down significantly.

This issue becomes even worse for users on mobile devices as your website struggles to fit the image to your visitor’s mobile screen automatically. To fix this issue, you can reduce the size of your image or move it further down on your webpage.

Some images, like backgrounds, don’t always load quickly. If they have a CSS file or internal CSS style tag, they may need a cache plugin to “lazy load” or defer their loading. You can use different options to achieve this, so it’s best to play around to see which option suits your needs best.

9. Eliminate Any Render Blocking Elements

Render blocking elements cause a slower load time for your website because they block other factors from loading first. This slowdown causes a drop in your core web vitals score and can create a bad user experience on your site.

View your page speed insight results to identify render-blocking elements like JavaScript, CSS (cascading style sheets), third-party tools, Ads, and more. Many of these elements may be added by the theme or plugins you use, so the process of identifying and removing them can be tricky.

Render blocking resources can generally be fixed by delaying the JavaScript. You can optimize the code and, “apply defer,” to reduce or disable this setting in your cache plugin. You’ll also want to do this for critical CSS, and most cache plugins will give you the options to optimize delivery and create a fallback.

10. Implement a CDN (Content Delivery Network)

CDNs are third-party services that create content for your website from different servers around the world. Depending on which CDN you choose, it can reduce the load on your website to improve the load times of other elements on your website.

Typically, a user will visit your site and connect directly to the original server through their browser and then download all of the necessary files for your website. Unfortunately, this process can lead to problems for users who may be located far away from your original server, resulting in longer loading times, higher bounce rates, and poor conversion rates.

Having a CDN in place connects the user to your site through a server closer to them, which allows your site to load more quickly and causes less strain on your original server. Using a CDN can also:

Make your site crash-resistant
Raise your SEO ranking
Improve User experience
Reduce your servers bandwidth usage

Additionally, some options come with firewall protection, spam request blocking, and content optimization. Whichever CDN you choose, you can rest assured that it will work hard to boost your loading times and improve your core web vitals.

11. Utilize Tools to Monitor Your Core Web Vitals

Google has provided a wide range of tools to help measure your core web vitals which can help you identify and repair any potential issues on your webpage. When you use these tools, you will have a better likelihood of pinpointing the main problems on your page and improving your website as a whole.

Lab Tools can help run a test on lab conditions. In addition, these tools can show how your users see your page, and it gives you the opportunity to optimize your website in a test environment.

Field Tools gives you insight into how your users experience your site in real-time. By taking a moment to understand how things look to a visitor to your website, you may better understand where their frustrations lie and develop a plan to boost their experience.

If you want to quickly compare your Lab and Field Tool performance, you can use the PageSpeed Insights plugin. This tool integrates your reports and offers multiple recommendations to improve user experience. All you need to do this successfully is to open the PageSpeed Insights webpage and enter your website URL.

12. Make Your Website Mobile Friendly

The majority of users these days browse the web on mobile devices, so if you don’t optimize your website for a mobile device, you are missing out big time! Google monitors how easy websites are to use and navigate on mobile devices, including how easy the content is to read, and verifies how clickable your links and on-page elements are.

Your layout should easily adjust for desktop and mobile users, and they should be able to see all content clearly without needing to zoom manually or scroll on their device. To check on this, you can utilize the Mobile Usability Report from Google to assess your website useability and pinpoint any potential issues your site could have.

13. Review JavaScript and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) Plugins

What sort of JavaScript and CSS plugins do you currently have in place on your website? Your website has to analyze and process all the code on your website as it loads, and when you implement external CSS or JavaScript, this analysis will stop.

The analysis won’t start again until the server downloads the Javascript, so it blocks all the other elements from loading and, as a result, delays your FCP and LCP. To fix this, you can use render-blocking to defer the JavaScript and CSS plugins in WordPress.

You can reduce CSS blocking by, “Minifying CSS.” This term refers to the removal of unnecessary spaces, comments, and indents in the code. By Minifying the data, the code will be able to load quicker. It’s also in your best practices to check to make sure you don’t have any lingering CSS from plugins and themes you may have uninstalled, as these can further slow download times.

Similar to the process of Minifying CSS, you can also “Minify JavaScript.” Your JavaScript plugins have a lot of extra space and data in them, so by removing these elements, you will improve your load times.

14. Break-Up Long Tasks

Have you taken the time to peruse your website code to see what the backend of your site looks like internally? By looking behind the curtain like this, you may find that you have large chunks of code called, “Long Tasks,” which can take a long time to load.

Once you’ve reduced unnecessary JavaScript on your WordPress site, you should check to see if you have any Long Tasks. If you do, break them down into several small tasks and enable them to run together. You can find these in your Chrome Developer Tools in the Performance Panel.

15. Address Slow Server Response Times

Whenever your browser sends a request to the server, your server responds with the requested package. The longer it takes for your browser to receive the response, the longer it will take to render your website.

Quick web hosting is both powerful and essential for a fast-loading WordPress website. However, if your server response time is considerable, no other improvements will be able to improve loading speed. To optimize your server response, you can:

Optimize your server by choosing the best host
Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network), which saves your content near the user’s server to improve server response time
Cache your assets to store data locally
Establish third-party connections early to allow your browser to anticipate connections

16. Identify Potential Client-Side Rendering Issues

Many of the elements on your WordPress site utilize client-side rendering. An example of this is when a user signs up for a site and has to enter a password twice, but if the password isn’t the same in both boxes, they get a warning sign even before they hit submit. This client-side rendering doesn’t have anything to do with the function of your site but can impact your loading.

There are many different functions similar to this which are helpful for the user but can affect your LCP if there is JavaScript involved. To resolve this, you can optimize your site to minimize the effects this can have on load times.

You can minimize critical JavaScript to cut down on the size of the data and defer any unused content. You can also implement pre-rendering, which will improve the LCP on your WordPress site.

17. Focus on Interaction Readiness

A weighed-down website that is heavy with JavaScript will have significant execution times. It will also have inefficient page reactivity and can result in frustrated users. You can use Progressive Loading to load important components more quickly to resolve this first-party issue.

Most WordPress sites use Google Analytics or a different third-party site to perform various functions. These analytics have scripts that can keep the network busy and cause your main thread to become unresponsive. You can choose to keep this script from loading until they are closer to the viewport to keep third-party execution more seamless.

18. Use WP Rocket to Fix Render Blocking Scripts

Once you’ve installed the WP Rocket plugin for your WordPress, you can access it by going to your settings and selecting the WP Rocket plugin from the File Optimization tab. Next, scroll to the bottom of the page and select the box to load the JavaScript deferred.

After WP Rocket is enabled, be sure to save the changes made to ensure they stick. By deferring the JavaScript to your website, your content will load without first loading the JavaScript. This tool can help improve your FID score when your website is affected by this slowdown.

WP Rocket allows you to quickly improve your website performance without requiring any technical skills or complicated steps. For example, it will turn on caching with the optimal settings for your website without turning on any additional JavaScript or CSS.

19. Encode and Repair Dimensionless Images

The best place to start is by optimizing your images by compressing them, and Google will flag images on websites that over-optimize and compress necessary selections. You can also serve images through a CDN that automatically rewrites your image URLs to better suit your website visitors from different regions.

If you have images on your website that don’t have their width and length attributed, your CLS score can increase. Your webpages load from top to bottom, which leaves a blank space on the page that’s the size of your image, but if the size isn’t specified, this blank space can cause the content to shift as it loads.

In order to avoid this shift, you should add the length and width attributes to the code to ensure the proper space is provided initially. Then, as the page loads, the content will stay put and allow the user to interact precisely with the items they desire.

20. Reduce Advertisements

Advertisements are one of the primary reasons you may have a poor CLS score. At the same time, most websites are generally designed to support dynamic ad sizes in order to generate more clicks and revenue for their business.

Still, large ads can shift the content your user wants, resulting in a poor user experience. To resolve this issue:

Reserve space for the ads, just like you do for images
Don’t collapse space, even if your ads are displaying in your reserved space
Review your historical data to choose the best size for your advertisement
Avoid putting your ads at the top of your page

You can implement Ad Inserter plugins on WordPress to have the option of setting the spot and size of your advertisement. Of course, there is a chance that the ad that populates the space will be smaller or possibly non-existent, but it’s your best bet at providing a better user experience.

21. Focus on the User’s Experience

The most crucial factor you need to remember is the user experience to improve your core web vitals. All of the details and work you will do really boils down to how seamless and easy it is for a user to access your website and find what they’re looking for right away.

User Experience (UX) is critical to keeping the user on your website long enough to find what they clicked through for, and encouraging them to come back in the future. If the user isn’t satisfied, they won’t stick around on your site, and they likely won’t click through again if they see your website populate on the SERP for different topics in the future.

Making the Most of WordPress Core Web Vitals

It’s no secret that Google’s core web vitals can make or break a website these days. While these updates can be daunting for new or seasoned WordPress websites, they are valuable to not only you as the site host, but they’re designed with the user in mind.

You’ve learned 21 valuable tips to help you achieve success, and now you fully understand what might be holding your site back. Ready to start a well-optimized WordPress website with built-in features to prepare you for Core Web Vitals? Get started here.