Currently not keeping track of your Core Web Vitals? Big Mistake! Big! HUGE!
Just as you go to the dentist to make sure your teeth won’t fall out anytime soon, you need to regularly review your website’s performance to ensure your user experience and ad monetization game is A-Okay. This is where Core Web Vitals make an appearance.
We’re sure you’ve heard this term come up quite frequently when it comes to website talks. Core Web Vitals are more than just a fancy set of words to sound smart during meetings. They are key metrics to measure your webpages’ loading performance, interactivity, and stability. These results play an important role in your search engine ranking position, which can affect your traffic and therefore your ad revenue.
Hold on tight to your device and keep reading to learn more about the Core Web Vitals you should keep in check!
What are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are a set of user-centric metrics by Google for search engine optimization (SEO) to measure user experience on a website based on its loading time, responsiveness, and layout stability. There are three key Core Web Vitals that good Publishers like you can’t miss:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Not the kind of paint you are probably thinking about. LCP aka Largest Contenful Paint measures your webpages loading performance tracking how fast the contents of a page take to render. It describes the time it takes from when someone loads a webpage until the largest image, video, or text block is rendered within the user’s viewport.
The ideal LCP score you should aim for is 2.5 seconds or less. Slow websites are no one’s cup of tea. So, keep your LCP in check to guarantee your site is loading nice and fast!
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
INP measures the interactivity of your webpages. It tells you how quickly your website can respond to users’ interactions, like when you click on the search menu and it takes you where you want to go.
The sweet spot right here is reaching an INP of 200 milliseconds or less. Having a low INP rate means that your website has good responsiveness and can swiftly provide visual feedback to most of the user’s interactions. That’s a total green flag!
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Cumulative Layout Shift or CLS is used to track your website’s stability. It measures the unexpected shifts in your website’s layout. One of the most frustrating things that can happen when you visit a website is when you click on something and everything changes positions. It really sucks! So always make sure your CLS doesn’t go above 0.1!
Usually, the shifts happen because uploaded images or ad spaces are without dimensions and the browser doesn’t ‘reserve’ space, so the layout shifts when an image finally renders and reveals its size. You can avoid this by making sure the appropriate space for the slots has been previously reserved by you, so units get inserted into that space without the need to push content up or down.
How can you improve your Core Web Vitals?
Having bad CWV scores is something absolutely no one wants for their website. It can affect your positioning search engine rankings and that can impact on your ad revenue. To avoid any Core Web Vitals issue you need to check them every now and then to make sure you are meeting the marks. According to Chrome’s web.dev, the 75th percentile of page loads should be meeting the recommended targets to have positive metrics.
Google has developed many tools to help you keep track of your Core Web Vitals. Some of them include PageSpeed Insights, Search Console, Lighthouseund WebPage Test. You can learn more about how to use them for your Core Web Vitals checkups in this article. While all these tools are insightful, it’s a good idea to use a combination of them to comprehensively understand your website’s performance.
And of course, a huge help is always counting on a good AdTech partner with solutions that take your CWV into account!
Maximize your ad revenue with A-Okay Core Web Vitals
At Refinery89 we have award-winning ad monetization solutions that were not only designed to take care of your Core Web Vitals, but also to improve them! So don’t hesitate to reach out to us to learn more on how we can maximize your ad revenue while helping you keep a healthy website!
