Core Website Vitals
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Content
Why do content marketers constantly feel cold? They’re surrounded by drafts.
This website team has been working since March to try different fixes for our website to improve our LCP and CLS scores. They updated our Wordpress, they tested the sticky nav as a contributing factor, and we purchased a plug-in to optimize all 10,000 of our photos. Next, they tried the Cloudways Breeze caching plugin but it disabled all of our homepage videos so it had to be turned off.
After the updates, we still are not seeing many "Good URLs" and it almost felt like a waste of time. And, I'm not sure that we will be able to get any more website hours approved for work on this. Does anyone have suggestions on how to go about fixing this? I assumed our website team would know the best solutions. Or is this just as good as it will get?
This is where we were at pre-updates:
Mobile
- Poor URLs: 385
- URLs Need Improvement: 0
- Good URLs: 0
- Poor URLs: 209
- URLs Need Improvement: 276
- Good URLs: 8
Mobile
- Poor URLs: 373
- URLs Need Improvement: 0
- Good URLs: 15
- Poor URLs: 0
- URLs Need Improvement: 474
- Good URLs: 8
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They do, thank you! The Berry Insurance site is also very helpful!
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That said, I did see a few things that caught my attention that you should have your existing developers look at:
• Embedded pages and post images I came across during my quick look at the site showed that the vast majority of images had been optimized. However, I found a lot of banner and background images (like this one https://aquilacommercial.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/banner-image.png) that were still 720-800kb.
• Content on some learning center pieces is being ported from Tableau, and that's tripping up Lighthouse's results; it doesn't seem to affect the real render time, but it does make Lighthouse's performance score drop.
• See if there's a way to optimize your YouTube embeds to be more streamlined and load more quickly. Embed Plus is a WP plugin that I know works for this.
• It may also be time to talk to your developers about using a CDN to deliver images instead of your own servers. Your server response times are the single biggest thing keeping your FCP score so low. You can also talk to your host provider.
I know it's not the easy fix you were hoping for, but I do hope these help!
(And another thing to keep in mind: your competition. Take a look at how their sites are performing in Lighthouse. If you're ahead of them, you're still the best in town!)
I figured it probably wouldn't be a simple solution but this gives me some leverage to bring to my team for (hopefully) putting some more time into this.
It looks like only two of our major competitors are ahead of us in lighthouse right now so I guess that is a good sign though.
I'm going to share this info with my team and see if we should pursue it further. If we do - I will reach out to you for some of your referrals!
Thank you again!!
I'm still looking into how to fix some of our banner images (our image optimizing plugin messes up their cropping - which is why I had to unoptimize them.) And we decided leaving the Tableau embeds was worth the hit.
We also have a Wordpress update we need and a lot of plugin updates - which I think are causing our issues but we are afraid to do these ourselves without breaking our website.
Just wanted to say thank you again for the advice - a lot of these smaller steps seem to be helping!!