After a bit of a hiatus we gathered together yesterday for our first (and hopefully not last) meetup of this year. In our WordPress Zurich March 2021 Meetup, we started with a little overview of recent and future WordPress releases before shifting focus to Core Web Vitals.
Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web.
It’s a very important topic, especially now that these quality signals become relevant for search. It’s also a bit complicated or perhaps overwhelming, which is why we’re thankful for our guest speaker Phil Marx who kindly offered to shed some light on it.
Phil provided an introduction to Web Vitals like Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and First Input Delay (FID), what these terms all mean and how you can check your own site, and some basic suggestions for improving your site’s Core Web Vitals.
It opened the floor for a nice discussion around the hot topic, which also led to some questions which don’t have good answers yet. For example, how to identify a theme’s Web Vitals scores before download/purchase. Or how the user experience can be improved if the theme is quite bloated but one isn’t a developer.
Suggestions to address the latter included things like image optimization, using CDNs, looking into AMP or other plugins providing similar assistance.
Further reading:
- Introduction to Web Vitals
- Core Web Vitals & Page Experience FAQs (Updated: March 2021)
- Phil’s Twitter account – he’ll share slides and try to answer any questions you might have