How To Prepare Your Website For The Google Core Web Vitals Update?

Business owners and webmasters share the same goal. You want to optimize your website in such a way that Google shows it to the target audience as high as possible in the result lists of the relevant search queries. It is important to know which priorities the search engine giant sets. Exactly how the Google algorithm works is a closely guarded secret. However, there are many tests and indications of what matters.

However, most webmasters break out in cold sweats when major Google updates are announced. One of them is the Google Core Web Vital Update.

Core Web Vitals Update – Will Everything Change?

No! What was good yesterday is not bad tomorrow! In recent years, search engine algorithms have placed increasing emphasis on user-friendliness. Regardless of whether it is informative pages such as the online editions of newspapers, regional and international online shops or online casinos such as Casimba , the experience that users had when visiting the respective website was becoming an increasingly important factor in Google rankings. This will not change in the future either. What has changed, however, is that the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a new value that is considered to be of great importance in influencing the ranking.

What is the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)?

Basically, this is the first “paint” of the website. The Largest Contentful Paint calculates the time that elapses from the page view to the rendering of the visible elements and their usability for the page visitor. The faster this is possible, the better the user-friendliness is rated.

Of course, there are many other factors that influence this value. This includes adapting to different screen sizes, usability on smartphones and other gadgets, legibility of the elements and much more. It is a problem for webmasters to reconcile all this. If a site works a lot with visual effects, videos and large-scale images, the LPC can quickly be too high and thus have a negative impact on the ranking.

How to optimize your website for the Google Core Web Vitals update

Before you start wildly “optimizing” it makes sense to get an overview of how the existing website is performing. There are various tools for this. You can get a first overview with the Chrome plugin »Web Vitals«. As a developer, you also get a lot of useful information with »Google Lighthouse«. Even hobby webmasters can prepare themselves for the Google Core Web Vitals update with a few simple measures:

Optimize images

Most websites have a dominant image, banner, or video on the home screen. In order for them to be displayed within the LCP threshold, they can be converted to an efficient format, since non-optimized media can significantly reduce their loading performance.

Prioritize content above page break

In fact, the content that users see right before they scroll is the most noticeable. Take advantage of this by optimizing and rendering your over-the-fold content first, and deleting or deferring JavaScript that you don’t need immediately.

Optimize web hosting

A faster server response time improves all metrics across the board. Improve JavaScript execution time and minimize user interaction delays with an improved web hosting service.

Optimize mobile use

Mobile-first indexing was introduced in July 2019 and will apply to every single website. Along with all SEO and web design experts, Google identifies mobile usability as a top priority.

Page content is still most important

There is nothing wrong with providing quality content to your site visitors to attract and add value to your website visitors. Google recently reminded webmasters that content relevance still outweighs site experience.

Use all Google optimization tools

The best way to ensure you meet Google’s website quality standards is to optimize using Web Vitals tools including PageSpeed ​​Insights, Lighthouse, Chrome DevTools, Chrome UX Report and the new Web Vitals Chrome extension.