This is How We Increased the Traffic of our Client’s Website by Fixing Core Web Vitals Issues
The client in question is a UK law firm that was having problems maintaining good organic rankings. They could feel that something was going on in the background that was negatively impacting their traffic and exposure. They turned to us when they saw that they had been losing traffic for some months and could not understand why. We assessed their website utilising various tools, including Ahrefs, Google Analytics and Google Search Console. We could clearly see that they had significant Core Web Vitals issues, which needed to be fixed immediately for the site to start performing again.
What are Core Web Vitals, and Why Are They Important?
Core Web Vitals are a set of performance metrics that measure your site’s user experience (UX). It includes the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), Time to First Byte (TTFB) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). These values have been shown to be critical indicators in providing an excellent User Experience, and as such, Google has now put them at the forefront when ranking sites for search engine results. This means if you pass your Core Web Vitals assessment on Google Search Console, you can achieve higher rankings on Google Search.
Our Approach
After figuring out that our client had a Core Web Vitals issue, we started off by doing a deep dive into the technical performance of their website. We then found that our client’s site was specifically struggling with CLS and LCP values. CLS means cumulative layout shift, which is the amount of time that elements on the page move around during loading. LCP, or the largest contentful paint, is the total time it takes for the primary content of a page to appear and be visible.
Fixing the CLS Issue
The first step we needed to take when thinking about how we could fix our client’s site and improve their CLS score was to identify how exactly a page or a post reacted as a user moved through it. In our client’s case, they had a top bar menu that disappeared and reappeared, which moved the elements on the page ever so slightly and also had an Elementor-based “Table Of Contents” feature loading on every single legal post they had, which pushed the text that followed it downwards about half a centimetre as a user scrolled down on a page. To test this, we used the “inspect feature” in Google Chrome and activated “Layout Shift Regions” under the rendering tab, allowing us to see how the page elements moved as someone scrolled through. By doing this, you can see if and how a page’s content moves due to a bad CLS structure.
Once the technical issues had been identified and we could clearly see what elements on each page were causing the CLS issues, we knew exactly what to concentrate on. So we disabled the disappear/reappear function on the top bar menu on both mobile and desktop and replaced the table of contents on each and every post with a new one generated from a very low-weight pluggin called the “Easy Table of Content Plugin”.
Fixing the LCP Issue
Fixing this issue was far more straightforward. LCP is mainly linked to image loading times, meaning that if you serve your images correctly in the most lightweight formats and implement lazy loading on a good caching plugin like “WP Rocket,” then you can usually resolve this issue quite quickly. So that is exactly what we did. The fix involved us analysing resources (e.g. images, scripts) that were taking too long to load and could be optimised in order to improve the overall performance of the site. We then further fixed other issues, such as render-blocking JavaScript, Gzip compression and minifying HTML & CSS files in order to reduce server response time and page load times. We also activated lazy loading for images and videos, optimised their images from JPG into WEBP format for faster loading times, and minified the CSS and JavaScript files to reduce their size.
How this Impacted Our Client’s Site
After the changes were made, we monitored the website’s core web vitals over the next two weeks to ensure that they continued to improve and that any issues that arise are quickly addressed. The website started to show steady increases in Core Web Vitals score and also traffic and impressions after the 1-week mark, which means that our work carried out to improve their Core Web Vitals, did not only increase the website’s rankings but also improve user experience as well. See the images below to understand how these changes impacted their analytics.
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Conclusion
The moral of the story is that you should never ignore your website’s Core Web Vitals, as they are essential for providing an optimal user experience that can significantly affect your business’s success. Investing time and resources into improving these values will pay off with improved rankings, increased traffic, and more robust user engagement. So start looking into your website’s Core Web Vitals and address any issues you come across as soon as possible! Good luck!
This article was written to provide tips and advice on improving a website’s CLs & LCP scores & SEO efforts. We discussed the issue our client was having with their CLS and LCP values, identified the technical issues causing them, and then outlined what measures we took in order to fix these issues. Finally, we looked at how our work impacted the website’s rankings and user engagement. Hopefully, this serves as a helpful guide for anyone wanting to know more about improving their CLS/LCP scores. Thanks for reading!
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Armen is an On-Page SEO and Content Marketing expert who is the CEO of ACERO. He frequently delves into subjects such as SEO, Link Building, Digital Marketing, UK Law, Finance, Music, Blockchain, Technology, and Lifestyle. His passion for research and his ability to articulate complex ideas in a clear and engaging way have earned him a reputation as a highly skilled and versatile author and digital marketing expert.