Optimising your website for the Google Core Web Vitals 👨‍💻💪

Keeping your chiropractic website’s high performance is key for organically ranking higher on search engines.

As the saying goes: if you’re not seen, you’re not remembered. This is also true when it comes to search engine rankings: only 10% of users click past the 1st page results from Google; 90% preferring organic search results over paid (sponsored) ads. Therefore, attention to SEO is paramount to good website performance. Plus, it will save you money in the long run.

What are the Google Core Web Vitals

According to Express Writers, Core Web Vitals are specific factors Google considers important when determining the quality of the overall user experience your page provides. They consist of three metrics related to loading, interactivity, and visual stability.

You’ll see them respectively referred to with three different acronyms:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The amount of time it takes to render the largest visible content block. In plain English, that means the time it takes for it to be obvious to your users that the page is loading.
• First Input Delay (FID): The amount of time between when a user interacts with an element on your page – like clicking a link – and when that element actually responds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): The sum total of all layout that which occur unexpectedly over the lifespan of the page. Layout shifts occur when a visual element like an image or heading unexpectedly re-arranges the content around it – such as when you make a browser window larger or smaller.

In other words, Google is now interested in knowing how long your site takes to load, how quickly it responds to a user’s actions, and how well it holds its layout together in the face of different browsers, devices, or screen sizes.

How does CWV affect your website’s ranking

Prior to the new Core Web Vitals changes, it was the content quality and user behaviours that affected your website’s rankings: things like time spent on page, relevant and rich content filled with keywords and bounce rates greatly affected your ranking performance. Design had little effect on the overall scores. With the new Core Web Vitals, Google aims at using both content and design as ranking factors.

A study in August 2020 suggested less than 15% of all websites out there are capable of passing a Core Web Vitals assessment. 🤯

This means that investing in a modern and responsive chiropractic website is key to have optimal SEO performance. The ability to load fast, adapt to multiple screen sizes and offer clear and easy navigation are essential parts of the equation for any website in the current day and age.

How to optimize your website’s performance

Taking in consideration the three CWV, a website should have or be:

• Responsively designed: the webpage should adapt its contents to the various screen sizes, using modern frameworks and libraries to optimize the layout structure as well as clean and concise media queries for responsiveness.
• Optimized assets: load times can significantly decrease when optimizing images and script loading. This means reducing image sizes and compressing them using modern file formats (ie. WebP images); deferring or inlining scripts which result in faster page rendering; removing all non-essential scripts and elements from the page.
• Lazyloading content: preventing content that is off-screen from loading results in a faster initial page render and improves user retention, as well as saving data transfers. This ensures the content only loads when the user scrolls to it.

All of our websites - including our Chiro Starter and Chiro Premium - are optimized using all of these insights and perform superbly well on both mobile and desktop versions.

Additional SEO tips

Keeping your website’s copy and keywords current is also an important step towards good SEO rankings; investing on a SEO package can help you optimize your content for search engines. Content that is relevant and engaging (ie. keeps the user browsing through the page and promotes interaction) is preferred by search engines. The more this content is visited, the more relevant your URL (website’s address) becomes to Google.