Core Web Vitals (CWV): How To Improve Yours & Get Faster Load Times
What are Core Web Vitals? Do they have an impact on SEO? Are they related to page speed? What’s a good Core Web Vitals score?
These are questions we’re going to answer in this post.
We’re going to discuss what Core Web Vitals are, whether or not they’re important, and how to optimize them.
What are Google’s Core Web Vitals?
Google Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics created by Google that determine a page’s user experience based on how fast it loads, how responsive it is to user input and how stable its layout is.
These factors are determined with three primary Core Web Vitals metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – Measures the amount of time it takes the largest piece of content in the viewport to load.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) – Measures how fast it takes for the page to respond to user input.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – Measures how much elements on the page shift throughout the browsing experience.
Interaction to next paint used to be called first input delay (FID), but this metric was retired by Google in 2024.
Why are Core Web Vitals important?
Core Web Vitals are important because they help you understand your site’s performance and user experience beyond a simple page speed score.
When a user first loads your website, only a portion of the page is visible in the viewport, which is the part of a user’s browser that displays web pages.
So, Google created the largest contentful paint (LCP) metric to let webmasters know how fast the largest image or video that displays in the viewport takes to load.
Interaction to next paint (INP) measures how responsive your site is to user interactions when it first loads.
When users visit your website, they expect to be able to interact with it right away. INP helps you understand how quickly your site allows that to happen.
Finally, when users try to interact with your site, they don’t want elements to shift on the page.
For example, when they visit your homepage, they may try to click on a particular button. However, if your page loads slowly enough to cause different elements on the page to shift during the loading process, your users may wind up clicking on something else.
Cumulative layout shift (CLS) measures visual stability and helps you understand how much your page’s layout shifts during the loading process.
Page speed is important, but these additional metrics give you a deeper look into your site’s performance from a user experience perspective.
Are Core Web Vitals important for SEO?
Page speed is a Google ranking factor. Plus, Google’s documentation for Core Web Vitals states the following about how these metrics affect search engine optimization (SEO):
“We highly recommend site owners achieve good Core Web Vitals for success with Search and to ensure a great user experience generally. This, along with other page experience aspects, aligns with what our core ranking systems seek to reward.”
This means that Google does take a site’s Core Web Vitals scores into account when ranking it.
However, site owners should be aware that there are 200 or so factors Google’s algorithm uses to rank websites. Site speed and Core Web Vitals are just a couple of them. And they’re quite minor.
The quality of your content, how relevant your content relates to search terms and the number of high-quality backlinks your site has are much more likely to impact your site’s ability to rank.
Typically, the only time your site’s performance truly impacts rankings is when your first performance is poor in comparison to your competitors. Google will usually demote it as a result.
Even so, your goal should be to keep your site as competitive as possible. Optimizing your Core Web Vitals performance metrics will help you achieve that. And your users will thank you for it.
Other performance metrics to monitor
Monitoring performance metrics is important because it helps you understand why users might not be interacting with your site at all.
Sure, they may not be interested in what you have to sell or promote, but there could also be something wrong with your site’s design or infrastructure that’s preventing them from having a smooth and seamless user experience.
Page speed is the most important metric to monitor after Core Web Vitals. It lets you know how fast your site loads.
Some tools that measure page speed even allow you to test your page load times in different testing environments, including specific device types, connection speeds, locations and browsers.
Bounce rate is an important metric as well. You can uncover this one with an analytics tool.
Google Analytics measures bounce as a session in which the user did not stay for longer than 10 seconds, did not engage in a key event, or did not visit a second page.
The percentage of sessions that meet one of these criteria out of all total sessions is your bounce rate.
Metrics like average time on page and average session duration can also help you determine user experience (UX). If they’re low for all pages, that might indicate that your site has a UX issue.
Conversion rate can also be used to determine user experience. While what you’re offering and how you’re marketing that offering have bigger impacts on your conversion rate, you’ll also see a low conversion rate if UX issues prevent users from converting at all.
All of these metrics aren’t important for SEO as they’re not ranking factors, but they can give you additional insights into your site’s performance.
How to view your site’s Core Web Vitals metrics
PageSpeed Insights is the best tool to use to view your site’s Core Web Vitals report. It’s developed and maintained by Google.
All you need to do is enter a web page into the tool, then click Analyze to begin.
The tool divides your score into two separate tabs: one for the mobile version of your site and one for the desktop version.
It’s common for the mobile version’s scores to be worse than the desktop version. As long as your four primary scores are green (90 or higher), you’re good.
Those primary scores grade your site on a scale from 0 to 100 on performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO.
If you scroll a little further, you’ll see your scores for Core Web Vitals.
Aim for green scores for all three metrics. These are good Core Web Vitals scores for each metric:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – Less than 2.5 seconds
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) – Less than 200 milliseconds
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – Less than 0.1
Analyze the following pages on your site, if you have them:
- Homepage
- Shop page
- Services page
- Contact page
- Individual product page
- Individual blog post
You can also analyze your most popular pages as well as pages you want to optimize for SEO.
Additional tools by Google that display Core Web Vitals scores include the Chrome User Experience report, or CrUX report, available in Looker Studio as well as the Core Web Vitals section of Google Search Console.
Tools like Uptrends, WebPageTest and GTmetrix also display your site’s Core Web Vitals scores.
These tools include performance data that provides insights into what’s affecting your score, such as what layouts are shifting, how you can optimize images, how much unused CSS is present on the page and other technical findings.
Use these findings to optimize your site in specific ways.
Core Web Vitals SEO tips
Let’s talk about how to improve your scores for each core web vital metric.
Certain optimization techniques improve one core web vital or another. Some optimization techniques may be entirely new to you.
Some might even be too technical. In those cases, it’s best to ignore them or ask a developer to implement them.
Improving largest contentful paint
As you’ve learned, LCP measures how fast it takes the largest piece of content in the viewport to load.
This mainly means images and videos, so by optimizing each, you also optimize your LCP score.
Make sure you use the right image format. WebP can be used for all image types. It’s optimized for the web and is smaller than PNG and JPEG.
If you don’t want to switch to WebP, use PNG for screenshots as well as images that have text and graphic overlays. Use JPEG for images you shoot yourself with a camera.
Start using a content delivery network (CDN), which serves copies of your content, including images, from servers located all around the world. This helps them load faster no matter where your users are located.
You can also compress images to reduce file size and lazy load them so only images visible in the viewport load. All other images will only load if your user scrolls to them.
To make improving LCP much easier, use NitroPack. It’s a website optimization tool that compresses images, implements page caching and activates a CDN for your site.
For videos, embed them from a third-party source, such as YouTube, Vimeo or Wistia, and disable autoplay.
Improving interaction to next paint
INP measures how fast your site responds to user input. This means improving your page speed is the best way to improve INP.
Many of the tips we already mentioned will help you improve your site’s page speed.
You can also improve your hosting infrastructure by upgrading to cloud hosting and implementing page caching.
Reducing the number of advertisements your site uses can also do a lot to improve its loading speed. Removing them entirely would be best if they’re not a major source of income for your site.
Oftentimes, the number of scripts your site runs and the way your JavaScript is programmed can have the biggest impact on performance.
WP Rocket is a fantastic WordPress plugin to use for this purpose. It’s a website optimization tool for WordPress that minifies and combines JavaScript and CSS files, reducing the number of scripts that need to run as your page loads.
This can help if your theme uses web fonts as well as if you use third-party applications on your site, such as customer relationship management software and chatbots.
WP Rocket also offers page caching.
Improving cumulative layout shift
CLS measures how much layouts shift on your page throughout the life cycle of the page.
This one can be tricky to optimize, especially if you don’t know how to code.
You can do a lot to improve this metric by optimizing your site for speed, including implementing all of the tips we already mentioned.
However, layout shifting isn’t something that’s caused by slow loading speeds. If your page has layout shifting, a faster loading speed will only speed up the amount of time it takes for the layout to shift. It won’t eliminate the shifting altogether.
So, how do you improve this metric?
Well, you can take a look at which elements of your layout are shifting in the first place. This is something PageSpeed Insights reveals.
For example, images and videos that don’t have width and height attributes are often culprits of layout shifting. Therefore, applying these attributes to images and videos will reduce or completely eliminate how often they shift.
You can also implement aspect ratio boxes in your CSS code. These ensure your site’s content remains responsive, which means their sizes adjust automatically based on the screen sizes your visitors view them on.
Large elements, screen takeovers and advertisements can also cause layout shifting.
Each of these elements take quite a bit of time to load (from the web’s perspective), so you can reduce layout shifting by simply eliminating them from your site.
For screentake overs, such as welcome mats, use popups that are triggered by specific events instead. You can implement popups that are triggered by time on site, idle time, scroll percentage and your user attempting to leave your site (exit intent).
For advertisements, eliminate advertisements that are larger than your user’s viewport as well as advertisements that take over the entire page.
These elements may cause layout shifting as they load.
Web fonts can also cause layout shifting since they need to be downloaded before your site can display them.
Final thoughts
Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics that is often accompanied by misleading advice. Such as, “the faster your website, the better it will rank.”
But the truth is that CWV and site speed are a minor ranking factor. You won’t see ranking improvements by making your site a few milliseconds faster. That’s just not how it works.
These factors usually kick in as a way of demoting extremely slow sites.
That said, there is a strong correlation between faster page loading speeds and conversions.
So, even though you may not win many points with Google once your page speeds go beyond a certain point, your users will appreciate it.
Faster is better.