PPC - Pay Per Click Management

May 2021 is looking to be an important year for the world of the internet.

This is the month that Google starts to introduce core web vitals as a ranking factor for their search engine results page.

Already, there has been a lot of talk about core web vitals. Most notably, how to speed up a website. This is mainly because, of the core web vitals, it is those that are linked to the speed of the website that have the highest weighting (see this page, for example, which measures the core vitals of an article about the largest living fish).

Of course, lots of attention should be put to improving the website speed. However, if you want all green core web vitals, you’re going to have to do a bit more than that. With this, here are 5 easy ways to help improve your core web vitals.

1. Implement a CDN. A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a great way of making sure your website is fast for every web user across the globe. It helps to reduce the distance between the web user and their request and the server location to getting the information (where a CDN uses multiple servers to deliver resources).
2. Use a cache. What is 1593 x 4529? The answer is 7,214,697 if you spent the time to calculate this. Now, if I ask you what 1593×4529 is again, you should know it is 7,214,697, as we just calculated it, and make a record. This is exactly what a cache does. It can radically improve the speed of a webpage by precalculating the page before the web user comes onto it.
3. Defer any javascript, including adverts. You will want to remove or defer all render-blocking scripts that might be influencing the speed of your website. Javascript stops the actual page from being loaded for the start. So, a better way of improving the perceived loading time is to ‘defer’ (push back) the scripts, so that the page loads, and then the scripts.
4. Make sure your background font is a like-for-like match. Most websites will use a Google font. The problem with this is that, on load, the text will load on the page, using a ‘backup’ font, and then load the Google font once the font request has loaded. This can cause CLS due to a large difference between the backup font and Google font. What you can do is use this font style matcher tool to pick a backup font as close to the Google font you are using.
5. Purge your unnecessary plugins. Let’s be honest. Do you need every single plugin on your site? You will probably find one or two plugins that are futile or can be replaced with something much simpler. If you can find examples of this on your website, do just that. The less code on a website to load, the faster it will be.