How to improve Core Web Vitals on your WordPress website

Core Web Vitals are metrics created by Google which are designed to measure the speed and visitor experience of your website. It is important to measure and improve the Core Web Vitals for your WordPress website as this will help with your SEO and user experience.

The Core Web Vitals Metrics

LCP – Largest Contentful Paint

The Largest Contentful Paint measures loading performance, how long the largest element in the viewport takes to load. Typically this is an image, text or video. To provide a good user experience this should be 2.5 seconds or less.

FID – First Input Delay

The First Input Delay measures interactivity, how long until the visitor can interact with your page. If you have a contact form with a button, the FID measures how quickly the interaction is processed when the button is clicked. To provide a good experience this should be 100ms or less.

CLS – Cumulative Layout Shift

The Cumulative Layout Shift measures visual stability, how much do elements on the page move around as it loads. If you have started to read some text and then an image loads above the next pushes the text down it is irritating for the visitor. To provide a good user experience this should be 0.1 or less.

How to measure Core Web Vitals for your WordPress website

When you want to improve Core Web Vitals, there are three tools from Google that are really helpful n measuring the metrics:

• Page Speed Insights: an online tool to test a specific page pagespeed.web.dev
• Search Console: reporting on each page on your website and specific metrics for each page
• Chrome User Experience Report: part of the Chrome browser developer tools. It is important to use this in incognito mode to give accurate results, otherwise browser extensions can affect the report.

There are also two other tools that we use:

• GT Metrix: to analyse the waterfall order that elements are loaded on the page

• WebPageTest: to identify the specific element which is causing the issue with the filmstrip view

How to improve your Core Web Vitals metrics

Once you have your baseline measurements on your key pages and WordPress page templates, then you will be ready to work though a list of improvements that you can make to your WordPress website.

Hosting

1. Optimise your hosting

Cheap hosting is a false economy, you need a Time to First Byte (TTFB) of less than 600ms. We are a WP Engine Agency Partner and recommend using Managed WordPress Hosting.

2. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

We recommend using Cloudflare and Cloudflare Polish. Quite a few of the managed hosting providers integrate really well with Cloudflare and have advice on the specific settings to use to optimise their CDN for your website.

WordPress Plugins

3. Choose a performance plugin

There are quite a few plugins which can help improve Core Web Vitals on your WordPress website.

Our favourite performance WordPress plugin is perfmatters, it is a simple plugin with brilliant documentation explaining each feature and is only $25 for an annual license. WP Rocket is another great plugin as well that you can use for this and an annual license is only $40.

How to improve your LCP

To improve core web vitals for LCP, first find out what is causing an issue. If this is a block of text, can you break it up into headings and paragraphs?

4. Load fonts locally

Can you adjust the fonts on your website and reduce the number of fonts being used?
Can you buy or create font files in a WOFF2 format and host them yourself?

If you are using a specific font in your banner then preload this font either in your theme or using a plugin.

If you are using Google Fonts then the perfmatters has a specific setting to enable you to host all your fonts locally, downloads and saves them on your hosting server.

If the LCP is due to an image, test serving it from your CDN?

5. Specify image dimensions

Make sure your theme generates the correct image sizes as you load images into your media library. You can also use a setting in perfmatters to add the image dimensions where they are missing for images in the content.

6. Convert images to WebP

Usually WebP will be a smaller format, but you do need to check this if your jpegs or png images are already well optimised.

Cloudflare can also generate the WebP files for you, but in this case if they are served from Cloudflare this may not be faster so test this.

We sometimes use a plugin such as WebP Express to generate the WebP files as they are loaded into your media library. This may need settings on your hosting server to be adjusted, but they have instructions on what to ask for on the support ticket.

There is also a new WordPress Core Performance team, who released a beta version of a plugin Performance Lab – this is not production ready yet and is testing things that may go into core. This plugin generates the WebP format files frm jpegs as they are uploaded if this is supported by your hosting server. This may be a new feature in WordPress version 6.0 which is due out in May.

7. Preload banner images

Preloading the LCP image can display it much earlier in the page load, you can usually target these in your theme or CSS, or with your performance plugin.

rel="preload"

8. Excluding the LCP image from lazyload

Lazy loading is where you delay an image from being loaded until they are needed and come into view as the visitor scrolls down the page. You can target the LCP image from being lazyloaded using a performance plugin and the filename or a class name in the code.

9. Use poster attribute for videos

First compress your LCP video before uploading it, or use a video service – YouTube or Vimeo.

Then when you embed the video use the poster attribute, this will display the image and only when it is clicked will the video load.

poster="image"

How to improve your FID

Improve core web vitals by reducing your FID. The first input delay generally happens when the browsers main thread is busy. Typically on a WordPress website this is because your website is slow OR caused by third-party domains.

10. Audit and reduce third-party code

You can use the third-party code report to find out what third-party domains are being called, and check they are all necessary!

11. Fix 4xx and 5xx errors

These errors will delay the page from loading, so check your GTMetrix waterfall chart for errors and fix the broken links and file not found issues in the theme or content.

12. Defer, delay and minify

Check that your WordPress theme has CSS and JavaScript minified (white space removed) and see if you can defer or delay files from loading. Be careful with this though – you can break your site. So we always recommend testing this on a staging server first.

13. Remove unused JavaScript

Quite a lot of WordPress plugins add JavaScript to the head of every page, but this may not be needed for the content on that page.

Examples of this include forms and maps; if you are only showing a map on your contact page, then there is no need to have the code loading on every page of the website. So if you are not using those on a specific page then use an asset unloading plugin to only load the code on the pages where it is required.

14. Use Brotli compression

All hosting servers – even the cheap shared hosting – tend to have GZIP compression as this has been around since 1992. But in 2013 Google engineers came up with another type of compression called Brotli. This is widely used across the large hosting providers so use an online tool to check if it is running on your hosting. You can use Cloudflare to enable this as well.

How to improve your CLS

To improve core web vitals and find CLS issues you can use the layout shift debugger in Web Page test to identify the specific elements.

15. Use font-display:swap

If the issue is with text, and the difference between the system fonts and your Google fonts then adjust the CSS in your theme. Try to avoid the use of Typekit and TTF fonts as this will delay the fonts from loading, and fix the text by using font-display:swap in your theme.

16. Specify dimensions for images, iframes, videos and adverts

If the CLS is caused by elements being slow to render in the viewport and then moving other elements around, that is an indication that you do not have height and width dimensions set correctly. These should be added to all images, iframes, videos and especially adverts.

Particularly for adverts, these often appear after other elements are rendered on the page so add the advert dimensions to the div containers in your theme so the browser leaves the space for the advert to appear.

17. Use CSS transform: translate() in animations

If you are using animations, make sure Google is not incorrectly classing them as CLS movement. If necessary get these re-coded. You should be using CSS transform instead of width / height attributes and use transform: translate() instead of top, bottom, left, right.

Improve Core Web Vitals with our help!

Do you have a slow WordPress website? Get in touch and we will be happy to audit the Core Web Vitals for your WordPress website and quote for working with you to improve these vital metrics.