What would you do if you were in a hurry and suddenly got stuck somewhere? Naturally, you would feel frustrated. Similarly, when a user visits your website, they expect the pages to load quickly, just like snapping your fingers, because users are often in a rush when they search for something on Google. The longer they have to wait for a page to load, the higher the chances they become more frustrated.

Think about it this way: if you are at a restaurant and you order a sandwich, but the service provided by the restaurant's management is slow, wouldn't this disappoint you? Websites follow a similar pattern.

According to Google, more than half of internet users, specifically 53%, are likely to leave mobile websites that take more than 3 seconds to load. Does your website load faster than that? If not, you're probably losing half of your website visitors. If users struggle to find what they came for initially or if the provided information is unsatisfactory, they might not return to your website.

Unfortunately, many website owners are struggling to improve their website's loading speed, but they can't manage to reduce their load time from 15 seconds to five seconds or less. This is due to various reasons, including heavy CSS files, content such as videos and high-resolution images.

In this blog, you will discover everything you need to know about enhancing your website's loading speed. These insights are compiled to provide a better user experience that facilitate faster loading. Although, before that, let's introduce Google's core web vitals to enhance your understanding of why they play a crucial role in your website's speed.

What are Google’s Core Vitals? And What Role do they play in Determining Websites Speed?

In May 2020, Google introduced Google's Core Web Vitals (CWVs): an innovative collection of measurements designed to evaluate website performance based on the user experiences they provide. By introducing Core Web Vitals (CWVs), Google aimed to establish a fundamental set of key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate the health and strength of websites.

Core Web Vitals (CWVs) are founded on the acknowledgment of the essential role that individual interactions on a website play in shaping the overall user experience across the entire site. Google concentrated its attention on three key indicators to assess the user experiences that websites and their web pages provide to visitors. These indicators are:

Largest Contentful paint (LCP)

This user experience metric is considered for measuring web page loading performance. Specifically, it works to measure the speed at which pages and media elements load on the website. Of course, who wants to stare at a white screen for a prolonged time? To address this issue, Google assigns poor LCP scores to websites that take longer to load, aiming to rank higher those websites that can load important content within 2.5 seconds.

First Input Delay (FID)            

This user experience metric is considered for measuring the responsiveness of a page. In simple words, it functions to measure the amount of time that passes between a visitor's first interactions.

Imagine you are exploring a particular page of a website and this webpage is filled with numerous buttons and design elements. When you decide to click one of these buttons and you notice that it takes an extensive amount of time to load. Doesn’t that situation feel quite frustrating? Of course, it does. To address this issue, Google assigns low FID scores to webpages that are enable to load design elements within 100 milliseconds or less.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

This user experience metric is utilized to measure how long it takes for web pages on a website to achieve visual stability. Not every design elements on a webpage load simultaneously.

For example, if your web page contains a large media file that's optimized but still heavy, placed in the middle of a paragraph, it may take more time to load that file compared to the text content. Once the media file becomes visible, it can rearrange other design elements on the page, causing confusion and frustration for users. CLS evaluates whether there are any design elements on a webpage that load slowly or create complications, which could potentially prevent visitors from easily enjoying the content.

First Contentful Paint (FCP) – less important CWVs

This is the fourth but slightly less important Core Web Vital. This user experience metric is utilized to measure the duration it takes for browsers on a webpage to display and load the initial content, which can be either an image or text.

How to improve websites core Web Vitals?

To improve the website's Core Web Vitals (CWVs), you need to familiarize yourself with key metrics such as LCP, FID and CLS scores. Utilize "Google Page-Speed Insights" to discover these metrics. Admins can employ this Google tool to assess the LCP, FID and CLS scores of each page on their websites, for both desktop and mobile versions.

What we do to Speed Up our UX folio Websites?

If you are curious about improving your website's loading speed, you have come to the right place. To attain a Google Page Speed score of 90, here are various strategies you can implement. This implementation will also enable you to achieve a higher rank in search results and align with the updated metric requirements.

1.      Check your Website’s Loading Speed using “Google Page-Speed Insights”

As mentioned above, you can test your page's performance using Page-Speed Insights. After entering your URL, PSI manages the rest of the process. In addition to providing a comprehensive performance score for the page, PSI generates a detailed report and even it offers recommendations on potential improvements.

This tool assist you the following suggestion like text compression, properly sized images, elimination of a video and removal of unused CSS. Mostly website design and development companies utilize page-speed Insights to assess the website’s loading performance.

2.    WordPress vs Custom Code

If your website is built using WordPress, you'll find various plugins that can help make it faster. For instance, Auto optimize can combine, simplify and store scripts and styles.

However, if your website is custom-built using a unique system, you won't be able to use these plugins. In that situation, you'll need to talk to your developer and ask them to focus on improving the website's speed. It might involve a bit more work, so show your developer some appreciation if they agree to help!

3.      Use the Coverage Report

Unused code can accumulate over time without you realizing it. When we refresh the UX Folio page, Chrome breaks down the CSS and JS files included on the page.

Want to speed up your website's loading? Using this coverage tool in Chrome to quickly see how much extra code you're sending and which files you can make more efficient. Additionally, removing unused code can improve your website's loading speed and conserve mobile data for your users.

4.    Test modification before updating them on your Websites

Make sure you test your modifications before implementing them on your production website. It's essential to test your changes because you might come across various bugs that shouldn't appear on your live website.

Developers at web design and development companies often make use of a local testing environment that replicates the actual website. This local environment is used to validate changes made to the website before they are deployed to the live server. You might also want to test a new WordPress version, install a new feature or make changes to the layout or design of a site.

Conclusion

Improving website loading speed is essential for user satisfaction. Long loading times can easily frustrate users and lead to high bounce rates. Google's Core Web Vitals, such as LCP, FID and CLS, play a crucial role in enhancing user experience. Testing and optimizing code, using tools like Page-Speed Insights and considering plugins (for WordPress) or custom improvements can greatly enhance loading speed. Digital Marketing Agency can also benefit from these techniques to ensure efficient user experiences.