How to Improve WordPress Core Web Vitals: Fixing Issues with Best Tools and Practices

WordPress Core Web Vitals optimization influence the website’s rankings, user interaction, conversions, and bounce rates. Therefore, it is inevitable to overlook your site’s Core Web Vitals score.

In this blog, we will brush up your knowledge by sharing the importance of improving LCP, FID, CLS in WordPress, practical ways to enhance them, and the best tools to monitor and improve your Core Web Vitals.

Why Do Core Web Vitals (CWVs) Matter?

By evaluating websites with CWVs, developers can discover how their platform works and how users feel about it. The following image shows an example of a Core Web Vitals Assessment for a website.

First Input Delay was replaced by Interaction to Next point (INP) in March 2024. However, the significance of both is quite similar, i.e. evaluating website’s response to users’ interactions.

You must be wondering why Core Web Vitals (CWVs) are important for your site? Here is the answer you were looking for:

Since CWVs are a combination of page response, speed, and stability, they create a strong first impression. A healthy Core Web Vitals score in WordPress not only enhances user experience but also increases the likelihood of conversions.

Essentially, optimizing WordPress sites for core web vitals directly influences your digital success. Understand it quickly with the simple benefits given below:

Better user interaction

Firstly, a website with fast loading, sophisticated performance, and stable layout, eases the consumer’s interaction. They feel relaxed and less stressed while navigating.

Therefore, improving LCP, FID, CLS in WordPress enhances overall users’ satisfaction.

Lowers the bounce rates

Secondly, when a website performs quickly to the queries, it is natural that users will stick to it for longer. On the contrary, a poor loading speed and unstable layout make readers leave the site in no time.

Hence, optimizing page speed restores CWV that eventually retains users.

Search Engine Optimization

Thirdly, a strong core web vital contributes significantly to enhancing WordPress user experience, pushing site rankings, and driving more organic traffic.

Recommended Values for WordPress Core Web Vitals Optimization

Each core web vital is assigned some value that helps developers understand the performance of their websites. Knowing these outputs enables better optimization in WordPress.

Ideal Values for Each Core Web Vital

As a developer, you need to know the best and worst values to achieve a better ranking.

The Most Effective Ways to Improve Core Web Vitals?

Does any Core Web Vitals metric fall into the “Poor” category in the table? It signals the need for fixes. Fortunately, improving them is easier than you think!

Take hold of the best WordPress performance optimization services and boost the factor that needs improvement.

Improving Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Making both small and substantial changes to a website helps in optimizing WordPress websites for Core Web Vitals. By working on images and their size can improve LCP metrics of Web Vitals in WordPress.

Optimizing Images Without Influencing Quality.

Images can be compressed using tools ImageOptim and TinyPNG without quality loss. Likewise, using advanced formats like WebP are typically 34% smaller than traditional image formats such as JPEG and PNG. Additionally, images can be set up for quick load by enabling lazy loading on your sites.

Using Page Caching Improve Website LCP.

When you enable the page caching, the page data is locally stored on users’ devices. This speeds up the page loading time and results in faster content retrievals. Keeping this in mind, the best WordPress performance optimization service providers always implement the browser caching to enhance user experience.

Deploy a Better Content Delivery Network

CDN or Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are a group of servers that store your website’s data across various data centres. Services such as Cloudflare and AWS CloudFront are popularly known to reduce network latency as they deliver the data by fetching it from the nearest server.

For example, if a website is hosted in Los Angeles and a user from Australia visits your website. The content delivered will be served from the server in Australia instead of the USA. Make sense?

In this way, the website load speed will be much faster!

Enhancing Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

When graphics like banners, advertisements, videos, and images are not defined by dimensions, they create mess when the page loads. Consequently, undefined width and height tend to push the content in different directions.

Set Clear Dimensions for Media

To achieve a good CLS score in WordPress, always set explicit width & height to the visual content.

For example:

<img src=”img.jpg” width=”340″ height=”100″ alt=”instance”>

The reason:

When dimensions are set, the browser reserves space for the content before it loads. It is just like how your best friend saves a seat for you in class because they know you are coming. Make sense, does it?

Thus, implementing this will eventually prevent content from jumping around. I know where it belongs.

Carefully Use Font Styles

Using too many web fonts interrupts the website’s Cumulative Layout Shift and lowers its score.

The reason:

Web fonts need to be downloaded for them to display on the browser. This significantly delays visual rendering of your WordPress site.

Hence, the best idea is to always use locally available, compressed, and modern fonts such as Cambria, Aerial, and Verdana.

Fixing First Input Delay in WordPress

FID is the evaluation of how long your website takes to respond to the users’ first request. Incorporating too much of JavaScript (JS) could negatively impact the First Input Delay score of your site.

Though JavaScript contributes to making the page more dynamic by adding features like buttons, animations, forms, and menus, excessive usage can slow down the response time.

• FID can be easily enhanced by removing unused JavaScript libraries, scripts, and all other non-essential coding.

• The large tasks that browsers perform can be broken into small segments with deferring code execution, for a refined user experience.

• Chrome DevTools help identify which website task takes more than 50 milliseconds. It can also optimize each segment that requires a fix.

While both FID and INP focus on a website’s responsiveness, optimizing the segments mentioned above can also enhance Interaction to Next Paint (INP).

What are Popular Tools to Test WordPress Core Web Vitals?

The following tools are used by expert WordPress developers to monitor and improve Core Web Vitals.

• Google Search Console

• Google PageSpeed Insights

• Pingdom

• WebPage Test

• GTmetrix

• Chrome User Experience Report

Master WordPress Core Web Vitals Optimization with BluEnt

Optimizing WordPress sites for Core Web Vitals is not merely about meeting Google standards but also taking care of your consumers. Consequently, it is about delivering the best user experience.

BluEnt offers the best WordPress performance optimization services to handle all the technicalities of your websites. We go beyond improving LPC, FID, CLS in WordPress, we focus on users’ retention and better interactions.

Gain a competitive advantage. Experience the excellence of our WordPress performance optimization services if you need help with:

• Identifying & Resolving Performance Issues

• Comprehensive Page Speed Audits

• Configuring & Optimizing Core Web Vitals

Need help with your website’s speed, performance, stability, and engagement. BluEnt is here to help! Just say our name & contact to experience the best practices for optimizing WordPress right away.