Huge improvements in Load Time & Core Web Vitals Scores

Overview

Google has been placing an increasing emphasis on actual website usability and user experience.

Core Web Vitals (CWV) was pushed to the forefront in 2021. 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.

The client’s website was loading quickly, but not meeting the threshold for positive scores in areas such as cumulative layout shift and first input delay.

Challenges

The client was using a custom built WordPress theme, which our team inherited.

In addition, the original marketing agency that worked with the client did complete basic optimizations.

Strategy

Our first approach was to implement basic items. This includes image file size and cache optimization, and the elimination of poorly executed tactics.

Then, our team reviewed the custom theme’s code to get a much better understanding of what was done. It’s never easy to reverse engineer someone else’s work, especially when they’ve left no notes!

We were able to find a number of items, such as how the theme loaded page styles into each page footer, that needed correction.

Any loaded scripts were brought in line with WordPress standards.

In the screenshot below from the client’s search console dashboard, we see a huge increase in URLs rated as “good.” The small 5.5% of remaining impressions without a score are indexed archive and category pages.

Results

Overall, the results were drastic.

Page load times were brought down to about 1-2 seconds on shared WP Engine hosting. In addition the flash of unstyled content and heavy layout shifting on mobile disappeared.

Shortly after, Google began to identify these positive changes and rate URLs accordingly.

The change also benefits users on both desktop on mobile, as they now have a more seamless loading experience, which is critical.