Websites are not set and forget. They can be affected by internal business factors and external factors. Internal factors include business changes such as staff changes, products changes, service changes etc. External factors can be website fashions such as slide shows, hero images or changes in search engines. Google has introduced Core Web Vitals which it’s rolling out at the moment.
You may not have heard of it yet but you will. Core Web Vitals are web page measurements to see how good your web page is at creating a wonderful website experience for your web visitors.
This is good news.
If you’ve ever waited for ages for a website to load, and may even have become so fed up that you’ve left, you’ll like Core Web Vitals.
If you’ve ever waited because the website has loaded but it’s not allowing you to do anything yet, you’ll like Core Web Vitals.
One thing to make clear - these measurements are for EACH WEB PAGE. Other website speeds may be per website but these are not. This means some of your web pages may rate really highly whereas others may have lower scores or fail completely.
Before we get into how to test your web pages, let’s explain what the measurements are and what they mean.
There are three main measurements.
Image courtesy of web.dev.
Largest Contentful Paint
This is how long it takes for the major part of the web page to load. If the web page is all text then it could load really quickly. If the main part of the web page is a large image then it may take longer.
Image courtesy of web.dev.
First Input Delay
This is the time it takes before you can perform any actions on the web page. For example, on a contact page, you may be able to fill in details in the fields but until submit form button is active, then that page isn’t responding. In this case, the time until the submit form button responds would be the FID.
Image courtesy of web.dev.
Cumulative Shift Layout
This is not a time measurement, but a measurement of how much the web page content moves around when it’s loading. Some news websites, in particular, can be poor at this as they load images and adverts. You can find that you go to click on one item you end up clicking on another item completely different because the content has moved around on the screen.
How to test for core web vitals
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
This is a test set up Google. It will only test one web page at a time. It also gives results for the mobile version of the web page and the desktop version of the same web page.
Another way if you use Chrome Browser is an extension
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lighthouse/blipmdconlkpinefehnmjammfjpmpbjk
If you have a small website then you could test each page individually, however, if you have a blog on your website doing it that way will take too long.
If you have Google Search Console set up, then you can check more than one page at a time.
Ordering an audit report from us also allows us to measure more than one page at a time and we can deliver a summary or detailed report.
How to improve your web pages performance
Please note that these suggestions are general in nature and you should hire a professional if you are not sure what you are doing.
As always before performing any updates or changes to your website perform a complete website backup and send it to the cloud.
You don’t have to implement all these suggestions. Implement one at a time and test your website again. If your website performance improves but there are still changes to be made, decide if you want to implement other suggestions. Always perform a backup before making any changes to your website.
Quality Hosting
Check the hosting plan for your website. It may be on a low budget plan that you started out with years ago. Cheap plans usually give minimum resources and this will slow down your website.
Cache Plugins
Cache plugins such as WP Fastest Cache - these can speed up your website generally by combining some elements of your web pages. Please note any cache plugin also can crash your website or stop some of your web pages, such as contact form pages, from functioning correctly. Please take note of any plugin settings and then retest your website.
Image Optimisation
Image optimisation plugins strip out unwanted information from your images such as camera information. This reduces the size of your images. Some of these plugins also allow your images to be served at the correct size for that web page and so speeds your web page up in two different ways. Shortpixel optimisation also has an adaptive images plugin so that 2 different plugins perform these processes. It’s important that if you install these two plugins, that you do not have compression set to on in both of them since that could cause an issue. You do not want the images on your website compressed so that their quality is impaired.
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
In the WordPress directory, you can find several plugins that do this. A content delivery network is like storing your website in different parts of the world. When a customer from Australia visits your web page they are served information closest to them in Australia, whereas customers in the USA would have information stored served closest to them. This speeds up the delivery process to your customers.
What to do next?
As always, if you’re not sure about implementing any of these suggestions, book in a chocolate and a chat 30-minute complimentary session (one per client). Together we can map out a plan to improve the performance of your website pages.
