Improving your website’s core web vitals can certainly help with your SEO. There are many ways to improve your CWV or Core Web Vitals. Before we get into three of the easiest ways to make these improvements, let’s look at what core web vitals are.
What are Core Web Vitals?
The short definition of Core Web Vitals is simply a set of metrics provided by Google to evaluate the visitor’s experience on a website. The better the visitor’s experience, the better your site will rank, in theory. Core Web Vitals include the Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift. These are three main elements you want to understand to improve your site’s core web vitals.
How to Improve your Core Web Vitals Fast and Easy
1. Optimize Images
Images tend to take more time to load than text and other elements of your website. Optimizing images is nothing new, but it’s a big part of improving your Core Web Vitals. It will fall under the Largest Contentful Paint category for improvement, in most cases.
While you might already optimize your images due to page speeds being an SEO factor, this is a fast and easy way to improve the user experience. If your images aren’t already optimized, this is the first place to start.
You can use a plugin with WordPress to easily optimize your images. Other platforms also provide tools to make this very easy. Compressing images makes your site load faster, which makes the search engines happier.
2. Use a Caching Plugin
A caching plugin will also help with speeding up your website’s load times. This is very important as the Core Web Vitals revolve around page load speeds. You want to speed up as much of your site as possible and a caching plugin is a great way to speed things up.
When you use a caching plugin, you will allow computers to remember some of the site elements to make them load faster. This is easy to do with WordPress. Just install one of the many good caching plugins and adjust the setting properly. WP Rocket is one of the top caching plugins for WordPress.
If you don’t use WordPress, your hosting company or CMS will likely have a caching tool of some sort. This is so important to improve your Core Web Vitals and very easy to implement quickly.
3. Get Rid of Your Unused Plugins
WordPress users can delete any unused plugins they don’t need and aren’t using. This can help to speed things up and provides other benefits, too. Too many plugins will slow down your site and harm your core web vitals.
You need certain plugins, such as an image compressing plugin, caching plugin, anti-spam, security, and SEO plugin. You might need a few other plugins, too, depending on your website.
Outside of what you actually need, all other plugins should be deleted. Don’t just deactivate them. Instead, delete them.
If you want to improve your Core Web Vitals and your SEO, these are three quick ways to do it.