How to Optimize Core Web Vitals for WordPress (Ultimate Guide)

We’ve all felt that flash of frustration when a webpage loads at a snail’s pace, or a button moves just as you try to click it. At WPBeginner, we obsess over site speed because we know these small moments make a huge difference in user experience.

When Google introduced Core Web Vitals, it gave a name to these performance issues, but the technical jargon can feel overwhelming. You might worry that your SEO will suffer if you don’t have a computer science degree.

The good news is that you don’t need to be a developer to get great scores. We’ve gone through this exact optimization process ourselves and have boiled it down to the essentials for you.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through simple, practical steps to improve your Core Web Vitals for a faster and smoother WordPress site.

Here is a quick overview of what we will cover in this guide:

1. What Are Google Core Web Vitals?
2. How to Test Your Google Core Web Vitals Score
3. Why Are Core Web Vitals Important?
4. How to Improve Your Core Web Vitals in WordPress (7 Tips)
5. Frequently Asked Questions About Core Web Vitals
6. Expert Guides on Measuring and Improving WordPress Performance

What Are Google Core Web Vitals?

Google’s Core Web Vitals are specific performance metrics that the search engine uses to measure a website’s overall user experience. These scores are part of Google’s page experience signals, which can influence your SEO rankings.

The truth is that nobody likes a slow website, and that includes Google. Core Web Vitals help you measure how quickly your site becomes visible, interactive, and stable for your visitors.

To do that, Google uses three key tests:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

The names of these tests might sound technical, but what they measure is quite simple to understand. Let’s look at how each one works.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Largest Contentful Paint measures how quickly the main content on your page becomes visible to users. This could be a featured image, a large block of text, or another prominent element.

A page might load quickly overall, but if the most important content appears last, the page will still feel slow to the user. LCP helps you spot and fix this issue.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

Interaction to Next Paint measures how long it takes for your site to provide visual feedback after a user interacts with it. This interaction could be a click, a tap, or a key press.

For instance, when someone clicks the ‘Submit’ button on your contact form, INP measures the time until something visually changes on the screen to acknowledge that action.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Cumulative Layout Shift measures the visual stability of your page as it loads. A poor CLS score means elements are jumping around the screen while the page renders.

This is frustrating when a user tries to click a button, only to have it move at the last second because an ad or image loaded above it. A good CLS score means your layout is stable and predictable.

How to Test Your Google Core Web Vitals Score

The easiest way to test your Core Web Vitals score is with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Just enter the URL you want to check and click the ‘Analyze’ button.

The results are shown in the ‘Core Web Vitals Assessment’ section. A passing grade will be noted in green next to the heading.

Below that, you can see the specific scores for each of the three vitals. To pass the assessment, you need to meet these targets:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): 2.5 seconds or less
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): 200 milliseconds or less
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): 0.1 or less

How to View Core Web Vitals for Your Full Website

To see an average score for your entire website, you can use the Core Web Vitals report in your Google Search Console account.

This report shows you which URLs on your site have good, needs improvement, or poor scores, allowing you to prioritize your optimization efforts.

For even more detailed reports, you can use the Lighthouse test built directly into the Chrome browser. Simply open a website, right-click anywhere, and select the ‘Inspect’ option.

Why Are Core Web Vitals Important?

Core Web Vitals are important because they directly reflect how users experience your website. They focus not just on raw speed, but on how quickly visitors can actually see and interact with your content.

A study found that a one-second delay in page load time can cause a 7% loss in conversions and 11% fewer page views. A faster website with a poor user experience is still hurting your bottom line.

Improving Core Web Vitals helps you address this. Since user experience is a confirmed Google SEO ranking factor, a good score can give you an edge over your competitors.

How to Improve Your Core Web Vitals in WordPress (7 Tips)

Improving your Core Web Vitals score in WordPress is not that difficult. By following some essential performance optimization tips, you can easily pass the assessment.

1. Optimizing Your WordPress Hosting

Your WordPress hosting provider plays the most significant role in your website’s performance. A quality host optimizes its servers specifically for WordPress, which gives your site a rock-solid platform to build upon.

At WPBeginner, we use SiteGround for this very reason. They are one of the few hosts officially recommended by WordPress.org, and their performance is excellent.

Their platform runs on Google Cloud and includes their powerful SG Optimizer plugin. It handles all the advanced caching and performance tweaks automatically, which is a major reason our site is so fast.

If you’re using a different host, then WP Rocket is the best alternative. It’s the caching plugin we recommend for our other projects, and it makes achieving a better Core Web Vitals score much easier.

2. Improving Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) Score

As we mentioned, LCP is the time it takes for the largest content element to appear on the screen. In a typical blog post, this is often the featured image or the article text.

To find out which element is being measured, scroll down the PageSpeed Insights results and expand the ‘Largest Contentful Paint element’ tab.

If it is a large image, try replacing it with a smaller file. You can learn more in our guide on how to optimize images for the web.

3. Improving Interaction to Next Paint (INP) Score

The Interaction to Next Paint score measures the time between a user clicking something on your site and seeing a visual response. A long delay here can make your site feel sluggish and unresponsive.

For example, imagine a visitor fills out a contact form and clicks the ‘Submit’ button. On our sites, we use WPForms because it’s built for speed and processes submissions without delay, creating a smooth experience.

A major cause of poor INP is JavaScript that loads before the rest of the page. The easiest way to fix this is with a plugin like WP Rocket, which we’ll show you how to set up.

First, you need to install and activate the plugin. After that, go to Settings » WP Rocket and switch to the ‘File Optimization’ tab.

Scroll to the bottom and check the box next to ‘Load JavaScript deferred.’ Don’t forget to save your changes.

This simple setting tells your website to load visible content first and wait on the JavaScript. This one change can dramatically improve your INP score.

4. Improving Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) Score

A poor CLS score is caused when elements on a page move around as they load. To see which elements are causing problems, expand the ‘Avoid large layout shifts’ tab in your PageSpeed report.

To prevent this, you must tell browsers the dimensions (width and height) of your images, video embeds, and ads. This allows the browser to reserve the correct amount of space for the element before it loads.

WordPress automatically adds dimensions to your images, but you should check other media embeds. You can do this by using the Inspect Tool in your browser to check if an element has width and height attributes defined.

5. Eliminating Render-Blocking Elements

Render-blocking elements are files, usually JavaScript or CSS, that must load before the rest of your page can be displayed. This slows down your perceived page speed and harms your Core Web Vitals scores.

PageSpeed Insights will list these problematic files for you. They often come from plugins and third-party tools like Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel.

Fixing this manually can be tricky for beginners. We have a step-by-step guide on how to easily eliminate render-blocking resources without touching any code.

6. Properly Sizing Images in WordPress

Uploading unnecessarily large images is a common mistake that slows down websites. High-resolution photos take much longer to load and are often not needed for web viewing.

This is especially problematic for mobile users. Even though your theme will shrink the image to fit a smaller screen, the visitor’s browser still has to download the full-sized file.

We have a detailed guide on how to properly optimize images for your WordPress site without losing quality.

7. Using a CDN to Improve Your Core Web Vitals Score

A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, is a service that makes your site faster for visitors all over the world. It does this by storing copies of your static files (like images and CSS) on servers in different geographic locations.

This allows users to download those files from the server that’s closest to them, which reduces load times. It also takes a lot of strain off your main hosting server.

For WPBeginner, we rely on Cloudflare’s enterprise CDN. It not only boosts our speed but also provides a powerful firewall that blocks millions of spam requests and malicious attacks every day.

For most businesses, even Cloudflare’s free plan provides excellent CDN service and basic firewall protection. It’s one of the most effective ways to improve your Core Web Vitals scores.

Frequently Asked Questions About Core Web Vitals

Having helped thousands of users speed up their websites, we get a lot of questions about Core Web Vitals. Here are the answers to some of the most common ones.

Q: What are the three Core Web Vitals?
A: The three main metrics are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) for loading performance, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) for website interactivity, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) for visual stability.

Q: What is a good Core Web Vitals score?
A: You should aim for an LCP of 2.5 seconds or less and an INP of 200 milliseconds or less. For CLS, a score of 0.1 or lower is considered good.

Q: Can a good theme automatically fix my Core Web Vitals?
A: A well-coded theme provides an excellent foundation, but it isn’t a magic bullet. Your scores are also heavily influenced by your hosting provider, image sizes, and the number of plugins you use.

Q: How often should I check my Core Web Vitals scores?
A: We recommend checking your scores at least once a month. It is also a good idea to test them after you install a new plugin, change your theme, or add major new features to your site.

Expert Guides on Measuring and Improving WordPress Performance

Now that you know how to optimize Core Web Vitals, you may like to see some other articles related to measuring and improving WordPress performance:

• The Ultimate Guide to Boost WordPress Speed & Performance
• How to Speed up WooCommerce Performance
• How to Properly Run a Website Speed Test (Best Tools)
• How to Stress Test a WordPress Website
• What Is Google’s INP Score and How to Improve It in WordPress
• How to Use GTmetrix Plugin to Improve WordPress Site Performance
• Fastest WordPress Hosting (Performance Tests)

We hope this guide helped you learn how to optimize Core Web Vitals for WordPress. Another key part of user experience is security, so we recommend following our WordPress security checklist to protect your site.

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