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Several websites and blogs have lost a lot of web traffic from bad backlinks and thin content. But despite the fixes, some still continue to lose the number of audiences they gained earlier. You may be number 1 in the search results and gain a lot of clicks, but your revenue and audience are not staying and browsing through your website.
The reason may be that your website is just too slow. It has been a common observation that when your page takes more than three seconds to load, there’s a high chance that your audience will leave. You are not only losing a viewer but also mone Google’s algorithm now prioritizes real-world users' experience, known as Core Web Vitals. These are scores that represent how people actually interact with your content. You need to fix them to get better rankings. To do this, here is a simple guide on how to exactly improve your website speed using actionable and high-impact fixes
Why Core Web Vitals Directly Impact Your Search
Google’s mission is to deliver the best answer to your audience's inquiry. Although it is recommended to provide an immediate answer, it does not mean to write very thin content. Google’s Core Web Vitals are factors that Google considers important for the overall user experience on your website page or whole website.
It measures loading performance, visual stability, and interactions. When these metrics are ignored, your bounce rates will skyrocket, and signal to Google that your content is not meeting the user’s inquiry. You can also look through the Page Experience update to confirm your web page’s metrics. when your invest more time here, it creates a good start for most technical SEO tweaks
The Three Pillars of User Experience
If you want to know how to improve website speed, you need to understand the three distinct metrics of the Core Web Vitals. Use these three metrics to ensure every visitor or customer on your website and any page experiences a smooth journey and engagement.
1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric tells you how fast the main content loads.
2. Interaction to Next Paint (INP): It measures the speed at which your page responds to a user’s click or tap on your website.
3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This metric tells you how stable every element on your web page is. If they don’t jump around, that is a good sign that your website has good CLS metrics
How Poor Scores Affect Conversion
Why do you need to optimize your website? Well, a one-second delay on the page load can reduce your conversions by 7%. Running a website or online business is not just about being visible and ranking high through keywords, but with the overall efforts that improve your customer and audience journey to eventually have high revenue at the end of the day.
When you have high CLS, that means the elements on your website are moving constantly. Your users may click the wrong buttons and get so frustrated that they would end up closing your page entirely or attempting to access your page constantly.
What happens when your page tends to feel sluggish? This means you have poor INP, and when that happens, your customers will abandon their cart or just leave the page to look for a better one. When your customers or audience come to your website, they either want to conduct a transaction or get information.
Both reasons intend to interact with your page smoothly, so fixing these technical issues is also fixing your sales funnel. When issues arise throughout their interaction, from a sluggish website and moving elements, they will hit the back button or close the browser entirely
Optimize Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) to Speed Up
Just like the name suggests, LCP measures how the largest element on your screen shows up. These could be your hero image or a simple background banner. Sometimes, these could just be the main headline blocks. If these elements load slowly, your audience may think the whole page is broken. To fix this, you can tell the browsers that this needs to load first
Prioritize the LCP Element
One of the most effective fixes is to add the fetch priority="high” attribute to the HTML tag of your hero image or element. This fix directly commands the browser to download this before hidden scripts or footer images.
But do not overuse this tag. It may lose its power on your web page. So ensure to use it only once on the most important element in your web page or above the fold to ensure the page appears usable to readers and customers instantly. Your LCP element is the first thing most audiences notice, and when it loads fast, it immediately tells them that everything will work out
Optimize Images Using Next-Gen Formats
If you are not an IT expert or hire others to improve your business page, you can start helping your website by turning your old, bulky images into lighter ones. You can convert them all to WebP or AVIF, so they can provide the same visual quality with file sizes 30% to 50% smaller.
Improve Interaction to Next Paint (INP) to Enhance Responsiveness
After improving the speed of your LCP, you need to enhance your page’s responsiveness. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures your web page’s latency between a user’s interaction with a click or a tap and the browser’s ability to show the next frame. When your main thread is busy, your website will feel like it has frozen.
If your website is gaining a lot of traffic or you are running an e-commerce business, improving your INP is the most important part. Most businesses come with filters and search tools that may slow down your website’s responsiveness to open a new page or simply provide the result that your customers are looking for.
Audit and Remove Heavy Third-Party Scripts
Some of the reasons that silently kill your INP are third-party scripts. You need to audit every script on your website and ask yourself Does this provide business value right now?’ If not, you just remove it. You can also ask a professional to help you with this decision-making.
What if these scripts are important? You don’t want to remove any valuable element from your website. Instead of helping boost your INP, you may just make it worse. So, if you consider the scripts important to your business, consider loading them via a proxy or only transferring them after the user interacts with the page. This way, you make your marketing tools work for you and your user when needed instead of slowing the journey.
Use Web Workers for Complex Calculations
What if your website performs heavy calculations from data to image processing? You can offload it to a Web Worker in a separate background thread. It can work on the calculations without freezing the user interface. If you are running advanced web apps, this can help. For example, if you are building a tool similar to personal knowledge management tools, where users sort and filter large databases, the logic must happen in a Web Worker to keep the UI responsive.
Stabilize Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) to Stop Jumping Elements
The last metric you also want to check and improve is the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). It measures your visual stability and scores how your page elements move unexpectedly. You may have experienced this yourself, visiting your favorite online store for that promotion.
You may have wanted to click the “Buy Now” button or simply a link to another page, but suddenly a banner or an ad load above it. You notice that when this happens, the link, button, or other elements in the page suddenly get pushed down or to the side.
When this happens, you sometimes click the wrong link or button. Remember that feeling of being caught in a trap and experiencing that terrible page journey. That can lead to a terrible user experience, and you need your CLS score to be less than 0.1. The easy fix is to simply reserve the space for content before it completely loads.
Set Explicit Dimensions for Media Elements
To fix CLS issues, you can set specific dimensions for your media elements. You can add the width and height, and when the browser sees these dimensions, it leaves the space on the screen to let the image, ads, or video load. Without the dimensions, the browser may not know the size until the image downloads. This may cause the layout to shift when it finally appears.
Reserve Space for Ads and Dynamic Content
Similar to the suggestion above, you can also reserve a space for your ads and dynamic content. Even if your ad has not loaded yet, you still have an empty box to hold the space for your dynamic content. This also helps your content and other page elements to flow around this reserved space smoothly. When your ads finally show, it does not push the text down. This fixes the jumpy elements that you may have also encountered many times at other websites.
Recommended Tools for Testing and Monitoring
Can you rely on gut feeling alone for your SEO? You can treat it as a sign, but not the entirety of what you need to fix. Google already provides you with excellent tools that provide hard data on how the audience moves through the whole search-to-website journey. With Google’s data and developer tools, you get the combination of simulated tests and field data. As a result, you have the full picture of your site’s health.
Google PageSpeed Insights and Search Console
Google PageSpeed Insights scores from 0 to 100, showing the opportunities for improvement. It provides Lab Data and Fiend Data reports. If you want a broader view, you can use Google Search Console. It shows Poor and Needs Improvement URLs in your entire domain. From this data, you know what pages you need to fix first.
Quick Answers on How to Improve Website Speed
Once you have made the fixes from the Core Web Vitals, it takes a few weeks for the Poor status in Search Console to clear up completely. Yes, the results are not immediate. Google typically re-crawls pages within a few days to a week.
When you improve your website speed, it does not get you the #1 ranking immediately. There are more than 200 factors to make it to the top 1. You still have other competitors that have been online for so long with better quality and authority. The effort can take years to get the top spot, but ranking in the first page of the search result or at least the top 10 results is much more possible. The efforts require consistency and fast adjustments to changing algorithms.
With all these tips and metrics, you may be confused about what to change first. You can always start improving your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) first. It is the most important Core Web Vital to fix. If your page does not load fast, your audience won’t even interact with it. You and your audience will also not notice the issues you have with your INP and CLS.
The Bottom Line: Future-Proofing Your Rankings with Core Web Vitals
When you learn how to improve website speed, you will understand why it is an ongoing process for optimization. At the same time, the result is not immediate. But one thing is for sure. Google Core Web Vitals are here to stay and help you.
As Google refines its algorithms, the Core Web Vitals will only become more important. Start by focusing on LCP for fast loading, then on INP for instant responsiveness. Then, work on your visual stability to have better CLS. You need to align your improvements and technical SEO efforts with your customer or audience needs.
Once done, you can reduce bounce rates and improve your dwell time to boost your rankings. Start auditing today, fix your high-impact items first, and your traffic will start to grow.
