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How to Prepare Your Website for Google’s Core Web Vital Updates?

Back in November 2020, Google introduced the core web vital updates for its users on the Internet and told everyone that this update will be in effect from May 2021. 

 

In this big update, they also did reveal that user experience will also contribute as a ranking factor. 

 

At the time, nobody quite as much knew what core web vital updates were and how they would affect their existing ranking. However, once the web vitals were implemented, there were many websites which experienced a gradual decline in their search rankings. 

 

Are you one such business owner or an entrepreneur who is planning to start their own website but are not quite aware of what goes into it to make it eligible for Google to crawl and rank? 

 

Well here’s an article that’s going to help you with that and much more. 

 

So let’s begin. 

 

What are Core Web Vital Updates? 

The core web vital updates indicate that when it comes to ranking a website on Google, it will bring into consideration three factors. These factors are; visual stability, web page speed & user interactivity. 

 

The technical terminology for these factors are: 

 

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
  • First Input Delay (FID)
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Let’s shed light on each of these terms to get a better grasp of what they are & their functions. 

 

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

In simpler terms, the LCP is the time your website takes to display its major content elements to the first time user. On average, Google takes into account 2 to 3 seconds for a less ideal website to paint the entire content correctly on the web page. Whereas, if your website has lower contentful paint, the chances of your website appearing on top searches becomes more eminent. 

 

First Input Delay (FID) 

It’s the time a web page takes to load up the first time and become interactive for the average visitor. Normally, an FID of around 100 milliseconds is considered a good FID and puts your website in the category of user friendliness. Similarly, websites with higher FID ranks low in the Search Engine. 

 

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) 

In simplest terms, it is the measurement of how unstable a website can be. It shows whether the website behaves as a consumer expects the website to behave during his/her interaction. The most common example of Cumulative Layout Shift is when the content typography seems disturbed and then gets back to normal eventually. It is supposedly standardized that CLS in a website should be almost 0.1. 

 

So now we know what core web vitals are and what important roles they play in making a website rank, let’s see what are the important factors that we need to bring to our attention in order to prepare our website. 

 

Test Your Pages with Google Lighthouse 

Getting a website prepared for Core Web Vital updates takes into account contributions from both web designers as well as developers. However, what they can’t anticipate where their website stands as per the core web vital updates until or unless they don’t know how it performs. Google’s Lighthouse page offers a separate testing tool just like GTmetrix to help designers and developers understand what makes the website perform better on the searches. 

 

The tools eventually help SEO specialists, website developers & designers to identify different elements which might be bogging down website’s speed & performance. 

 

Allocate Space for Images & Embeds 

There are countless occasions when we visit a certain website and suddenly start observing different elements shift until the page completely loads up. It happens because of the improper allocation of spaces of images and embeds on a particular website. To make sure this doesn’t happen, Google has put the CLS factor as an important consideration for website ranking. Google knows that this creates a negative user experience which will automatically result in making the visitor experience bad. 

 

It usually happens with a website when developers leave blank spaces within the website in several locations for different loading web elements. One way to counteract this problem is by allocating space for images & embeds and as a result, you can get a slightly low CLS and eventually better ranking. 

 

LCP Optimization 

As discussed earlier, LCP is about how fast the content on your website paints in order to provide you (the viewer), an interactive experience. With LCP optimization, you can remove the load time that usually involves image rendering, content delivery & other such aspects. 

 

According to Tony Mamedbekov, Principal Solutions Architect at San Francisco, websites can easily be optimized to deliver better LCP when they have their frontend decoupled from the backend using a headless CMS. As he states in one of his accounts: 

 

“If you have your frontend decoupled from the backend by utilizing a headless CMS, you can use Jamstack to pre-render the page for speed and deploy it globally and serve from the CDN,”

 

It may sound a bit risky for the website’s stability, but it surely does act as an important factor to optimize page loading speed. 

 

Using Mobile Responsive Page Templates on Your Website 

Nowadays, many business owners capitalize on making their website mobile device optimized. Gone are the days when having a responsive website template was just an option. Today, in a world ruled by smartphones, making your website mobile friendly is mandatory. We all know that Google has already given a separate measuring index for mobile devices and since then has been penalizing websites which are less mobile friendly. So just in case, if your website isn’t quite well optimized to rank on Google, you may have a website that might suffer a setback. So make sure your site is mobile optimized. 

 

With that being said, here’s what we know about what you can do to make your website more in coherence with Google’s Core Web Vital updates. Are you looking for a website design that perfectly meets the requirement of Google’s Core Web Vital updates? At Kamsoft, we provide website solutions that are accordingly. Kamsoft technologies have website designers and developers who can help you give a website that’s fully optimized, aesthetically appealing & highly interactive. 

 

Feel free to get in touch with us. 

 

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