Core web vitals will be official ranking signal on MAY 2021. Google already give everyone at least six months to prepare for this. We strongly recommend you fix the core web vitals issue at least 28 days before MAY2021.
Table of Contents
Why core web vitals validation take 28 days?
Google will monitor the traffic usage statistics for 28 days to verify your affected pages already core web vitals compliance. If your website have good traffics, it may only take a few days.
How to validate fix core web vitals?
You can do it on google search console. After login, go to the core web vitals tab on left, then click on affected pages and click the validate fix button. If your website have really low traffics, core web vitals in google search console may not show any data yet.
Why core web vitals are important?
Google is the best search engine. Core web vitals is for user experience. Google care about the users and want website owners to take a further steps to optimize their website for speed. To be honest, we never bother core web vitals in the past because you can rank extremely well even your website do not have good pagespeed insights scores. Unfortunately, MAY 2021, things will change.
Websites that have really low pagespeed insights score may hit pretty hard especially ecommerce websites. Why ecommerce websites but not blogs? Every new Google’s Algorithms update will mostly effect buyer intent pages first. Ecommerce websites, most of the pages are products, buyer intent pages.
You might ask, should i have to worry if mine is a blog? We can’t give you an accurate answer to be honest. We strongly recommend you fix your core web vitals issue as soon as possible.
From our personal point of view, core web vitals is good. Not everyone having a really good internet connection speed in their mobile devices. A fast loading websites can help the audience find the info they need faster. Google is doing the right decision.
What actually slowing down your website?
- CMS ( content management system )
- Hosting provider
- Theme
- Plugins
- Images
- Layout
- Third party scripts
- Fonts
- Display ads
- Traffics
To improve core web vitals, we have to know what actually slowing down the website first.
Content management system
Some unpopular CMS may give you a big headache and have a really poor pagespeed insights score because the platform is not well coded. We strongly recommend WordPress. WordPress is not only for blog but also can perform extremely well if you want setup
- ecommerce website
- online learning website
- job board
- membership website
- Portfolio website
- question and answer website
- review website
- affiliate website
- community website
- social media website
- digital store
- event website
- landing page
- news website
- cv website
- press release website
- directory
- podcast
- coupon website
- contest website
- petition website
- wiki website
- movie sharing website
- organizational intranet
- auction website
Another reason we recommend WordPress is WordPress is an open source, have many free plugins and theme to choose from. You don’t have to spend so much money to kick start your online journey.
Hosting provider
A good hosting environment can make your website load fast. How to determine which hosting package suit your online business? Our previous video tutorial will help.
When choosing hosting provider, please pay more attention to
- Physical Memory Usage
- CPU Usage
- I/O Usage
- IOPS ( Input/output operations per second )
- Entry Processes
- Number Of Processes
Unlimited disk storage, unlimited monthly bandwidth, unlimited addon domains, unlimited databases not important. If you can host unlimited websites and the hosting provider limit your cpu usage, i/o usage, your websites will not perform well in term of speed.
Many website owners they made a wrong decision and choose shared hosting. For your info, shared hosting, your entire account ( no matter how many websites you hosted there ) can only access to single cpu for max 30 seconds. Some hosting provider they give you more and some hosting provider they may give more. If exceed the cpu usage, your account will be automatically limited for the next 24 hours and your websites will run extremely slow.
If your website have more than 5000 visitors per month, we strongly recommend cloud hosting or WordPress hosting. Don’t use share hosting. Paying a little more money on hosting package worth it.
You can also use the tools we recommend in our previous video tutorial to test how fast your host is performing.
Theme
Many people prefer multi purpose WordPress theme because premium themes offering us many header styles to choose from. For example, betheme have 20 header styles and we can switch header style with a single click.
For your info, in web design, the most challenging task is header. Everything below header, we can use builders such as visual composer, oxygen builder or elementor to style easily. Just drag and drop. Very user friendly.
The problem is the more header styles or functions the premium offer, more scripts the premium theme will execute and this will definitely lowering down your pagespeed insights score. We strongly recommend pick a light weight themes such as generatepress, genesis or astra. These light weight theme will give you the extra love that you need in core web vitals. Trust us, theme is the key if you want to get a good pagespeed insights score in mobile.
Is generatepress theme seo friendly? Yes. We benchmark this theme before and the results are amazing! Anyway, the free version will have some limitation and we strongly recommend you buy the premium version. You will never regret with this extraordinary theme.
Plugins
A plugin is similar to an app in our mobile devices. When you need an extra function, you download an app. Too many plugins will make your website load extremely slow. Less plugin is always a smart choice.
Some plugins such as revolution slider, wordfence use too many scripts and take too much server resources. As a result, your website will load extremely slow, really bad user experience.
Images
Large images, image types or too many images will also lowering down your pagespeed insights score. We do not recommend png. Please use jpeg or webp instead. Image optimization is the first thing you have to do if you want to make your website core web vitals compliance.
Shortpixel and litespeed cache are the best of the best image optimization plugins. Shortpixel is paid while litespeed cache is free. Both work like a charm but shortpixel can convert the image to smaller size without any image quality lost.
Website layout
Too messy layout may also give you a really bad pagespeed insights score. Serverfreak did a good comparison, showing you that even if your page only have a few line of text and an image, the location of the image also have an impact on core web vitals. Please feel free to read their test at https://wow.serverfreak.com/2021/core-web-vitals/#2_Text_image_above_text
Overall, if you place image, video underneath text, your page will score higher in pagespeed insights. This is how core web vitals measurement.
How to solve this problem? WordPress 5.6 and above already have lazy load image function ad will solve majority of the images issue. Optimization plugins will help. No worry. We will show you how to do that shortly.
Third party scripts
Facebook pixel, youtube embed, vimeo embed, google recatcha, google analytics are the well known third party scripts that almost every websites will have. Unfortunately, to make your website core web vitals compliance, we have to delay the execution of those scripts until the primary content has loaded.
To solve this, we recommend Flying Scripts by WP Speed Matters. After you activate the plugin, go to setting and put the following into the Include Keywords section. Set the timeout to 5 seconds
gtag
fbevents.js
recaptchagtag will delay google analytics. fbevents.js will delay the execution of facebook pixel javascript and recatcha will delay google recatcha scripts.
Google fonts will also slowing down your website. You have two option.
- Use standard fonts
- Host the font locally
Remember, the golden rules in core web vitals is host everything in your host, not load the scripts from any third party sources.
Display Ads
If your website displaying google adsense ads or any google partner’s ads such as ezoic, mediavine, adtrive, your website will never get above 60 in pagespeed insights test.
The good news is those google partners have in-house tools that can help you. For example, ezoic ( min entry to apply is 10k visitors per month ) offering site speed accelerator for free to their publishers. This tool will increase your website speed. The site speed accelerator + add extra love. This paid version can delay ads, reduce cpu intensive tasks and preload core jquery. We have niche websites getting 100/100 in mobile and desktop with this awesome tool. The paid version worth every single penny you spend.
Traffics
If your website have heavy traffics, TTFB ( Time to First Byte ) will be high because the server is busy handling current queries by existing visitors. Upgrading your hosting package to a better package is the best option to solve this issue. Try to get more ram and cpu usage.
How to make your wordpress website core web vitals compliance?
If you plan to launch a new website, we highly recommend the following 7 steps. Don’t miss any step and we promise you will get at least 90 in mobile and desktop when you test your website with pagespeed insights.
- Choose a light weight theme.
- Use light weight plugins.
- Less plugins is better. For example, to redirect http to https, many people use really simple SSL. You can simply put a few line of codes in .htaccess. Why add another plugin and add extra weight to your lovely website?
- Optimize your images and convert them into webp format.
- Host google font locally.
- Delay the execution of third party scripts.
- Choose a better hosting plan.
If you already have a website, now suffering in core web vitals, we recommend the following 9 steps.
- Change theme, if possible
- Reduce plugins.
- Install litespeed cache if your hosting provider use litespeed web server.
- Install Flying Analytics by WP Speed Matters to host google analytics scripts locally
- Install Flying Scripts by WP Speed Matters to delay third party scripts
- Install Asset CleanUp Pro
- Install WebP Converter for Media to convert your images to webp format.
- Replace slider with static background image section.
- WP YouTube Lyte ( if you embed youtube video )
Please trust us. After you change to light weight theme, most of your core web vitals issues will be automatically solved. We try with hundreds of websites. Light weight theme is the golden key to get a good pagespeed insights score.
Asset CleanUp Pro is a gold mine too. This plugin allow you to unload scripts/plugin per page basis. For example, if you are using contact form 7 and only show that form on contact us page, you don’t want contact form 7 plugin scripts to load in other pages right? This plugin can help.
Another example is WP Word Count plugin. This is a well known plugin to niche website owners. This plugin will count the total word count of your website and display it into dashboard. You can unload the scripts in front end with the help of Asset CleanUp Pro. We will show you one website that we use Asset CleanUp Pro alone, without any optimization plugin and manage to get 100/100 in pagespeed insights shortly.
Bonus for you: Please add these line into your .htaccess and your WordPress website can load even faster. The .htaccess mode write will allow your website use the maximum ram allow.
php_value memory_limit 1024M
Examples of core web vitals compliance layouts
We made three tests.
- generatepress theme + 19 plugins
cloud hosting, no cdn
2 CPU Usage
1.5gb Max Physical Memory Usage
8MB Max I/O Usage
5,120 Max IOPS
20 Max Entry Processes
100 Max Number Of Processes
Pagespeed Insights scores: mobile 100/100, desktop 100/100 - generatepress theme + 18 plugins + visual composer
shared hosting, no cdn
1 CPU Usage
1gb Max Physical Memory Usage
15MB Max I/O Usage
5,120 Max IOPS
20 Max Entry Processes
100 Max Number Of Processes
Pagespeed Insights scores: mobile 86/100, desktop 98/100 - generatepress theme + 17 plugins + visual composer + litespeed cache plugin
shared hosting, no cdn
1 CPU Usage
1gb Max Physical Memory Usage
15MB Max I/O Usage
5,120 Max IOPS
20 Max Entry Processes
100 Max Number Of Processes
Pagespeed Insights scores: mobile 99/100, desktop 100/100
You can check out the test website domains in the video below.
From our tests, you will aware of we do not even use litespeed cache plugin and also managed to get perfect pagespeed insights score. How is it possible? It is possible if you use Asset CleanUp Pro to unload plugin per page basis.
generatepress theme + 19 plugins test, even have 19 active plugins, no all plugin scripts will load because we already unload them. Furthermore, we are using light weight theme and do not use any builder such as visual composer or elementor.
We are not against any website builders but if the layout default WordPress editor can achieve that easily, why burden the page with another script? Remember the golden rule, less plugin is better? Less plugin, less execution of scripts, higher score in pagespeed insights.
Off course, if you still prefer to use builder to style your page layout, you can use litespeed cache to combine JS and combine Javascripts. You will still get a good score.
Those pages that you struggling to build using default WordPress editor, you can still use visual composer. Just unload visual composer scripts on every pages that you build using default WordPress editor.
Final thoughts:
Overall, if you want to get full scores in pagespeed insights, you have to choose a light weight theme and unload scripts per page basis. We already show you an example we managed to get full score without any litespeed cache plugin or wp rocket plugin. It seem difficult but if you are willing to spend some time to learn how to do that, your audience will love you. Your website will load extremely fast and google will credit you for what you have done.
Core web vitals will be officially ranking signal, remember?
Optimizing your website speed will also reduce the server load. In other words, you don’t have to spend so much money purchasing high end hosting packages anymore.
If you are interested to learn how to use Asset CleanUp Pro to get perfect pagespeed insights score or which layout is the best core web vitals compliance, please subscribe to our mailing list. Once we publish that guide, you will be notify and immediately start learning all the hidden skills.