If you have a WordPress site, you understand the value of a top-notch user experience. It impacts your conversion rate, subscriber count, ad views, search engine rankings, and more.

Poor Core Web Vitals can negatively impact that user experience.

But what exactly are Core Web Vitals? Why are they so important? And how can you improve WordPress Core Web Vitals? Let’s take a look.

As your site traffic increases, you’ll want to ensure that things continue to run smoothly. If visitors have to wait more than a few seconds for your page to load, they’ll likely leave your site and may never come back.

Fortunately, there are some simple tests to evaluate your performance and, if improvements are needed, there are solutions that can almost immediately improve your loading times. 

In this post, we’ll discuss one aspect of site performance: First Input Delay. You’ll learn what it is, why it’s important, and how you can measure and improve the FID score on your WordPress site.

Measuring a website’s user experience (UX) can be a tough challenge. But that’s what Google’s attempting to do with the Core Web Vitals metrics. And scoring well on these is important because Google weighs user experience when determining search engine rankings. 

There are several metrics that are part of Core Web Vitals, and they could sound a bit intimidating. The good news is that there are several tools that make it easier to understand your score and how to improve. 

In this article, we’ll look at one particular metric: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). This measures how long it takes your website to show the largest element that you see on the screen. 

We’ll discuss how it impacts the user experience and what causes a poor LCP score. Then, we’ll show you how to improve it.

One of the hallmarks of a user-friendly website is that it doesn’t keep visitors waiting too long while loading. Caching static assets is a critical step to improving site performance, but it doesn’t help much to simply set this up and move on. Without an efficient WordPress caching policy, you might struggle to provide fast loading times.

Fortunately, learning how to leverage browser caching on WordPress is easier than you might think. You can configure browser caching manually, and the Content Management System (CMS) also enables you to use tools that do it for you.

In this article, we’ll explain how browser caching works and discuss its benefits. We’ll also show you how to check if caching is enabled on your site and look at different ways to turn it on. 

Time to First Byte (TTFB) and server response times are metrics that directly correspond to your website’s perceived speed and overall performance. Optimizing your site to minimize these times can help improve Core Web Vitals scores and, consequently, edge out stiff competition for search engine ranking positions. This also helps you provide the best possible user experience for your site visitors.

Working on these metrics might sound complicated, but there are plenty of ways even beginners can reduce TTFB and server response times on WordPress. For instance, you can install optimization plugins, use a Content Delivery Network (CDN), or migrate to a faster web host.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at TTFB and why it’s important. Then, we’ll discuss six ways to reduce your TTFB and server response times. 

Using web fonts, CSS, and JavaScript can make your website more unique and interactive. But waiting for these file types to load can be frustrating for your site’s visitors.

This is where preloading key requests in WordPress can come in handy. By telling browsers to download these file types earlier in the request chain, they’ll be on hand when the browser is ready to render the content. In turn, this can speed up your perceived page load time and provide a better overall web experience. 

In today’s guide, we’ll discuss what preloading key requests means, along with the potential performance benefits for your website. Then, we’ll explain how to do this on your WordPress site with Google Fonts, Font Awesome, CSS, and JavaScript.

The domain name system (DNS) is one of the cornerstones of the web. Without DNS lookups, it would be impossible to know which domain corresponds to which IP address (the location where a website’s files are hosted). As it is, these lookups can happen in milliseconds, allowing you to jump from website to website almost as quickly as you can click on a link.

Reducing the number of DNS lookups can help keep your website loading times in check. It’s a simple process you can undertake in a number of ways, but it can have a significant positive impact on the user experience.

Below, we’ll go over the basics of DNS lookups, how they work, and how to measure response times. Then, we’ll discuss how to reduce DNS lookups in WordPress. 

If you’re a website owner, you’ve likely thought about site speed at least once in the past. After all, Google considers speed when determining where to place sites in search results. So, if your site is slow to load, you’re at a disadvantage when it comes to ranking. And we all know that higher rankings lead to more traffic.

So, how do you make sure your WordPress site is loading as quickly as possible? One way is to lazy load your images.

Lazy loading is a technique that delays the rendering of images and videos until they’re needed. Implementing this can speed up your site considerably, and the great news is that you don’t need to be a developer to put this to work.

Today, we’ll show you how to lazy load images and videos in WordPress using two methods: with a plugin and without.

Images and videos are a great way to make your web pages more engaging and interesting to visitors. But lots of images on your website can slow down your loading times. This can affect your pages’ search engine rankings and your site’s user experience (UX).

Fortunately, you can optimize and compress images to increase site speed. Whether you’re a WordPress expert or a complete beginner, you can find a method that works for you — like using a plugin, a simple online tool, or the image editor on your device. 

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at why you should consider optimizing and compressing images. Then, we’ll show you three ways you can do this and explore other useful strategies for speeding up image delivery.