What are Core Web Vitals (CWV) & how do you fix them?

Web Vitals CWV icon

Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that measure the performance, speed, and user experience of a website.

Named “Web Vitals” and accessible via web.dev/vitals, this initiative by Google is meant to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web. Since 2020, these elements are playing an active role in search indexing and positioning/ranking. If you’re wondering where your website or websites are currently sitting in regards to these important factors, you can check using Google Pagespeed Insights.

Google has provided a number of tools over the years to measure and report on search performance, like the tool above or Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.

Some common ways to address Core Web Vitals include:

  1. Optimizing images: Large images can significantly increase the load time of a website. Compressing images and using appropriate image formats can help reduce the size of images and improve the load time of a website. Webp and Avif formats are the current formats preferred by Google.
  2. Minimizing the use of third-party scripts: Third-party scripts, such as social media widgets and advertising scripts, can add additional load time to a website. Minimizing the use of these scripts can help improve the load time of a website.
  3. Enabling server-side caching: Caching allows a website to store frequently accessed data in a temporary storage location, which can reduce the time it takes to load a page. Enabling server-side caching can help improve the load time of a website.
  4. Optimizing the use of JavaScript and CSS: Reducing the amount of JavaScript and CSS used on a website and optimizing their delivery can help improve the load time of a website. Consolidating or combining these types of files can also help, but note to separate the primary code used above the fold when the first contentful paint (FCP) occurs to speed up the processing without making the server/browser load all files and scripts.
  5. Using a content delivery network (CDN): A CDN is a network of servers that deliver web content based on the geographic location of the user. Using a CDN can help reduce the load time of a website by delivering content from a server that is closer to the user.

As you plan your marketing strategies and web optimisations, keep in mind these CWV tactics as well as the fact that content continues to be king. Without authoritative, constructive, and effective content, SEO, paid media, and other digital marketing results will be limited. At Thoroughbrand, we offer a wide variety of services that we would recommend all digital properties employ–whether it is online listening or periodic audits to ongoing content and paid media, to SEO.