By following the tips outlined in this guide, you should be able to optimize your WordPress development and Core Web Vitals. It is important to measure and monitor website performance. We will run through essential performance optimization tips in order to improve the core web vitals score and site’s performance.

How to Improve Google Core Web Vitals for Your WordPress Website?

How do I measure Core Web Vitals on my WordPress site?

These are the questions that WordPress website owners and developers have been asking.

Core Web Vitals is fast becoming of the most important search ranking factors. To define this it is a set of website performance metrics measuring page speed, visual stability, and responsiveness. It is important to optimize Core Web Vitals because it can impact search engine optimization (SEO) and user experience. Google and search engines have prioritized Core Web Vitals as part of their overall ranking algorithm and they will be used to determine which webpages rank high in the SERPs (search engine result pages).

This guide will help you understand how to optimize your WordPress site’s Core Web Vitals. We will cover topics such as optimizing images, reducing third-party scripts, enabling caching, minifying code, and more. We also recommend methods of running a core web vitals assessment.

Why are core web vitals important?

Core Web Vitals are important because they measure the page speed, visual stability, and responsiveness of a website. These metrics are used to determine how well your site performs in terms of user experience and search engine optimization (SEO). Google uses Core Web Vitals as part of their overall ranking algorithm so it is important to optimize them in order for your pages to rank higher in the SERPs (search engine result pages).

The WordPress Gutenberg block editor is a way to easily create content that is optimized for Core Web Vitals. The block editor allows you to quickly add images, videos, and other media without needing any coding knowledge. It also includes features such as lazy loading images which can help improve page speed. We will explore this in further detail later in the article.

What are the three core web vitals metrics?

First, let’s take a closer look at each of the core web vitals metrics and core web vitals scores. There are certain core web vitals score thresholds we will discuss for an optimal user experience.

First Input Delay (FID) measures the time it takes for your website to become responsive after a user first interacts with it. A good FID score is less than 100 milliseconds. This metric is important because it reflects the user experience of your website. A website with a good FID score will feel fast and responsive, providing a better user experience for visitors.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the stability of your page layout. A good CLS score is less than 0.1. This metric is important because it reflects the user experience of your website. A website with a good CLS score will have a stable layout, reducing the likelihood of unexpected layout shifts and providing a better user experience for visitors.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the time it takes for the largest element on your page to load. A good LCP score is less than 2.5 seconds. This metric is important because it reflects the user experience of your website. A website with a good LCP score will have fast loading times, providing a better user experience for visitors.

Now that we have a better understanding of the core web vitals, let’s explore some strategies for improving them on your WordPress website.

How to monitor your core web vitals

To monitor your core web vitals, you can use the PageSpeed Insights tool from Google. This tool analyzes your website and provides information on its performance, including its core web vitals. To use the PageSpeed Insights tool, follow these steps:

1. Go to https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
2. Enter the URL of your website into the search field and click “Analyze”
3. The PageSpeed Insights tool will analyze your website and provide a score for each of the core web vitals: First Input Delay (FID), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). It will also provide suggestions for improving each metric.
4. To monitor the performance of your website over time, you can use the PageSpeed Insights API. This API allows you to programmatically access the performance data for your website, allowing you to track changes in your core web vitals and identify trends and patterns.

By using the PageSpeed Insights tool, you can monitor your website’s core web vitals and track its performance over time. This can help you to identify areas for improvement and take action to improve the user experience of your website.

Using google analytics to monitor core web vitals is a great way for web developers and business owners to ensure their site is performing optimally. With google analytics, they can track performance indicators such as loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability to determine how successful their website is in reaching their desired goals. Through google analytics, they can easily measure aspects of user experience and make improvements based on the feedback they gather. This will ultimately lead to higher levels of user experience and increased performance.

Using the site kit plugin by Google for WordPress is a great way to monitor core web vitals. This plugin makes it easy to access data from various Google services such as PageSpeed Insights, Search Console, and Analytics in one place. With this data at your fingertips, you can quickly identify any issues that may be affecting the speed or performance of your site, giving you the opportunity to take proactive steps to improve the user experience. It is also a powerful tool for understanding how changes to your site might impact performance, allowing you to make more informed decisions about site optimization. Even if you’re not an experienced developer, site kit provides detailed yet easy-to-understand information that anyone can use to maximize website potential.

How to improve your website’s core web vitals?

Take care of these UX metrics

There are several UX metrics that you should consider when evaluating the performance of your website’s core web vitals:

1. First Input Delay (FID) measures the time it takes for the page to become responsive after the user first interacts with it. A good FID score is less than 100 milliseconds.
2. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the stability of the page layout. A good CLS score is less than 0.1.
3. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the time it takes for the largest element on the page to load. A good LCP score is less than 2.5 seconds.

These metrics are important because they reflect the user experience of your website. A website with good core web vitals will be fast, stable, and responsive, providing a better user experience for visitors.

How can I improve Cumulative Layout Shift Score?

To improve your Cumulative Layout Shift score, you can follow these best practices:

1. Avoid inserting content above existing content. If you need to add new content to the page, make sure to append it to the bottom of the existing content.
2. Add dimensions to images and video elements. This will allow the browser to reserve the appropriate space for these elements, reducing the likelihood of layout shifts.
3. Use a font loading strategy to avoid invisible text. This can cause layout shifts when the text is rendered, resulting in a poor CLS score.
4. Use the will-change CSS property to notify the browser of elements that are about to be animated or changed. This can help the browser to optimize the rendering of the page and reduce layout shifts.
5. Use the animation and transition CSS properties to animate changes in your page layout. This can help to make layout shifts more predictable, resulting in a better CLS score.

By following these best practices, you can improve your Cumulative Layout Shift score and provide a better user experience for your website visitors.

How to Improve First Input Delay (FID) Score?

To improve your First Input Delay (FID) score, you can follow these best practices:

1. Reduce the amount of JavaScript on your page. JavaScript is a common cause of FID, as it can take time to execute and block the main thread.
2. Use lazy loading to delay the loading of content that is not immediately needed. This can help to reduce the initial load time of your page, improving the FID score.
3. Optimize the size and number of resources on your page, such as images and fonts. This can help to reduce the time it takes to load the page, improving the FID score.
4. Use a server-side rendering solution, such as prerendering, to serve the initial HTML of your page. This can help to reduce the initial load time of your page, improving the FID score.

By following these best practices, you can improve your First Input Delay score and provide a better user experience for your website visitors.

How to Improve Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) Score?

To improve your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score, you can follow these best practices:

1. Optimize the size and number of resources on your page, such as images and fonts. This can help to reduce the time it takes to load the page, improving the LCP score.
2. Use lazy loading to delay the loading of content that is not immediately needed. This can help to reduce the initial load time of your page, improving the LCP score.
3. Use a server-side rendering solution, such as prerendering, to serve the initial HTML of your page. This can help to reduce the initial load time of your page, improving the LCP score.
4. Use the defer and async attributes on your script tags to control the order in which JavaScript is executed. This can help to prevent JavaScript from blocking the rendering of your page, improving the LCP score.
5. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have become increasingly popular in recent years due to their ability to improve core web vitals, a core measure of website performance. Thanks to CDNs, websites have the potential to load faster than ever before. Moreover, when deploying a CDN, websites can benefit from improved rendering and reduced content latency. As core web vitals play a key role in the user experience – and therefore lower bounce rates – CDNs are an invaluable tool for businesses looking to optimize their LCP and make sure customers enjoy the best browsing experience possible.

By following these best practices, you can improve your Largest Contentful Paint score and provide a better user experience for your website visitors.

Move to a faster hosting provider

A faster web hosting provider can help your website’s core web vitals in several ways:

1. Improved First Input Delay (FID): A faster hosting provider can provide faster page load times, reducing the time it takes for the page to become responsive after the user first interacts with it. This can improve your FID score.
2. Improved Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): A faster hosting provider can help to reduce the time it takes for resources, such as images and fonts, to load. This can help to prevent layout shifts, improving your CLS score.
3. Improved Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): A faster hosting provider can help to reduce the time it takes for the largest element on the page to load. This can improve your LCP score.

Overall, a faster hosting provider can provide many benefits to your website’s core web vitals, resulting in a better user experience for your website visitors. As a WP Engine partner, we advise and host all our client’s sites on this specialized Managed WordPress hosting.

Reduce excessive features

Reducing website features can improve performance because it reduces the amount of work that the browser has to do to render the page. A website with many features and heavy resources, such as large images and videos, can take longer to load and render, resulting in a poor user experience.

By reducing the number of features and optimizing the remaining features, you can make your website faster and more efficient. This can lead to faster page load times and a better user experience for your website visitors.

Additionally, reducing website features can also reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred between the server and the browser. This can help to reduce the amount of bandwidth used, improving the performance of your website.

Tidy above-the-fold

Tidying above the fold on your website refers to the practice of organizing and simplifying the content and design elements that are visible on the initial view of your page. This can help to improve the user experience by making it easier for visitors to find and access the information they are looking for.

Tidying above the fold can also help to improve the performance of your website. By removing unnecessary content and design elements, you can reduce the amount of data that needs to be loaded and rendered by the browser. This can lead to faster page load times and a better user experience.

Overall, the purpose of tidying up the fold on your website is to improve the user experience and performance of your website. By simplifying and organizing the content and design elements above the fold, you can provide a more streamlined and efficient experience for your website visitors.

How to Fix Core Web Vitals on WordPress Sites?

Optimize your images

To optimize your images on WordPress, you can follow these steps for most image optimization plugins:

1. Installing and activating image optimization plugins, such as WP Smush or EWWW Image Optimizer. These plugins can automatically optimize your images as you upload them to your website.
2. Use the “Media Library” to view and manage your existing images. From the Media Library, you can select the images that you want to optimize and use the plugin’s tools to optimize them.
3. Use the plugin’s settings to customize the level of optimization and the file formats that will be used. For example, you can choose to compress images to a certain level or convert them to a more efficient file format.
4. Once your images are optimized, you can use them on your website as you normally would. The optimized images will be smaller in size and faster to load, improving the performance of your website.

We also recommend the use of Squoosh.app a free online open-source tool created by Google that will efficiently encode images in a range of file formats. . It allows users to compress and resize images to reduce their file size, making them faster to load on a website. Squoosh.app can be used to improve the performance of a website by reducing the size of its images, resulting in faster page load times and a better user experience.

Squoosh.app is easy to use and provides a range of advanced image optimization tools, including the ability to compare the original and optimized versions of an image side by side. It supports a variety of image formats and can be used on any device with a web browser.

By optimizing your images on WordPress, you can reduce their size and improve the performance of your website. This can lead to faster page load times and a better user experience for your website visitors.

Other considerations to take are too lazy to load images.

Optimize your code

There are endless ways to improve website code, and there is no way for it to be perfect. It is possible, however, to give your page speed a measurable boost without putting much effort into it by picking a few low-hanging fruits.

Changing the order of CSS and Javascript files are loaded and removing unnecessary elements from your code files are two things you can do right away. Below, we’ll look at these methods in more detail.

Defer Non-essential JavaScript

If your page contains JavaScript files, the browser will delay loading HTML until the JavaScript is loaded. As a user experience, it means staring at a frozen page while nothing seems to be happening. Not only is it unpleasant for users — but it will also affect your Core Web Vitals.

If the JavaScript piece isn’t essential, you can move it to the end of the rendering process after all the essential elements have been compiled. Since we are discussing WordPress, this can easily be achieved with a plugin. Some plugins that can defer JavaScript are Async JavaScript, Autoptimize, and Speed Booster Pack. You can also use WP Rocket to defer JavaScript and solve all your performance issues.

Minify CSS, JS, and HTML Files

A code minifier removes unwanted formatting from a code document, such as lines, spaces, and comments. In some cases, you can achieve a 40% reduction in size, which is a marginal improvement.

Using a WordPress caching plugin is the easiest way to minify your code. Autoptimize, WP Super Minify, and Fast Velocity Minify are some popular minification plugins.

You can manually minify your website or use online minification tools if you don’t want to install more plugins. In this case, you would need to download the file from WordPress, minify it online, and re-upload it. Popular online tools include CSS Minifier, JavaScript Minifier, and HTML Compressor.

Why you should use the WordPress native Gutenberg Block Editor?

The Gutenberg block editor is a new content editor for WordPress that uses a block-based approach to creating and organizing content on your website. This editor offers a more intuitive and flexible way to create and manage your content, resulting in a better user experience for your visitors. In this article, we will explore some of the key features and benefits of the Gutenberg block editor and how you can use it to create a better WordPress site.

The Benefits of Using the Gutenberg Block Editor

One of the key benefits of the Gutenberg editor is its simplified page structure. Unlike the traditional WordPress editor, which uses a single text area to create and organize your content, the Gutenberg editor uses a block-based approach. This means that each piece of content on your page is represented as a separate block, allowing you to easily move, rearrange, and style your content without affecting the rest of the page.

Using the Gutenberg Block Editor to Create a Better WordPress Site

The block-based approach of the Gutenberg editor also makes it easier to optimize your website’s performance. Because each block is treated as a separate entity, you can optimize the individual blocks on your page without affecting the rest of the content. For example, you can use the built-in image optimization tools to resize and compress your images, reducing their file size and improving your page load times.

Another key benefit of the Gutenberg editor is its enhanced performance settings. The editor includes a performance settings panel that allows you to control the loading and execution of JavaScript on your pages. This can help to improve the performance of your website by reducing the impact of JavaScript on your core web vitals, such as First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

In addition to its performance benefits, the Gutenberg editor also offers a more intuitive and flexible way to create and manage your content. The editor includes a wide range of block types, including text, images, videos, buttons, and more, allowing you to create rich and engaging content for your website. It also includes built-in tools for styling and formatting your content, such as color pickers, font options, and alignment controls.

Tips and Tricks for Using the Gutenberg Block Editor on Your WordPress Website

The Gutenberg block editor, named after the inventor of the printing press, Johannes Gutenberg, is a content management system used in WordPress to create and manage website content. It is a revolutionary tool that allows users to create and edit content using a block-based interface, making it easy to customize and extend with additional functionality.

One of the key features of the Gutenberg editor is its extensibility. It comes with a built-in set of blocks, such as paragraphs, headings, images, and videos, that allow users to create a wide range of content. However, these blocks are just the beginning. With the use of toolkits and additional blocks, the Gutenberg editor can be extended to support even more content types and functionality.

One way to extend the Gutenberg editor is through the use of toolkits. These are collections of blocks, templates, and other features that can be added to the editor to enhance its capabilities. For example, the WordPress core team has developed a set of toolkits for common content types, such as tables, lists, and galleries. These toolkits can be installed directly from the WordPress plugin repository, making it easy to add new functionality to the Gutenberg editor.

Another way to extend the Gutenberg editor is through the use of third-party blocks. These are blocks that have been developed by independent developers and are available through the WordPress plugin repository. They can be installed and activated just like any other WordPress plugin, and once activated, they will appear in the Gutenberg editor as additional blocks that can be used to create and edit content.

One of the great things about the Gutenberg editor is that it is built on an open-source platform, which means that anyone can develop and contribute their own blocks and toolkits. This has led to a thriving community of developers who are constantly creating new and innovative blocks that can be used to enhance the functionality of the Gutenberg editor.

One of the most popular third-party blocks for the Gutenberg editor is the advanced columns block. This block allows users to create complex layouts for their content, with multiple columns and custom widths. This can be used to create sophisticated page layouts that would not be possible with the default blocks provided by the Gutenberg editor.

Another popular block is the carousel block, which allows users to create a slideshow of images or other content that can be displayed on a website. This can be a great way to showcase multiple images or other content in a visually appealing way.

There are also blocks available for more specialized content types, such as recipes, product listings, and event calendars. These blocks can be used to create and manage complex content types that are not supported by the default blocks provided by the Gutenberg editor.

In addition to blocks and toolkits, the Gutenberg editor can also be extended with custom CSS styles. This allows users to create custom styles for their content, such as custom fonts, colors, and margins. This can be a great way to create a unique and personalized look for a website, and it can be done easily using the Gutenberg editor.

Overall, the Gutenberg editor is a powerful and flexible tool that can be extended in many different ways. With the use of toolkits, additional blocks, and custom CSS styles, the Gutenberg editor can be customized and enhanced to support a wide range of content types and functionality. This makes it a valuable tool for anyone looking to create and manage content for a WordPress website.

Conclusion:

Optimizing Core Web Vitals is essential to create a great user experience and rank better in Google search results. The powerful Gutenberg Block Editor can help you easily optimize your WordPress website with the right tools, features, and tips to make sure your website is up to standard. With the right approach and steps, you can improve the performance of your site and increase its chances of being visible in organic search. Take action today! Optimize Core Web Vitals for your WordPress site with the Gutenberg block editor and watch your rankings skyrocket.

Thank you for reading our guide on how to optimize core web vitals for WordPress using the powerful Gutenberg Block Editor. We hope this information has been helpful and that it gives you an idea of what strategies are available