Speed is everything. The difference in seconds – even milliseconds – can cost your ecommerce site money. In fact, it’s been revealed that slow-loading websites cost retailers £60billion. Yikes. If your LCP and FID scores are in the red and amber, then it’s a good idea to try and get back in Google’s good books as CWVs have since been rolled out as search signals to influence website rankings.

It’s best to start with a site-wide audit to view all the pages, as well as producing a Google Search Console report, which will reveal any tech issues. PageSpeed Insights can also analyse your CWVs and overall performance score out of 100. To improve LCP, it’s mainly about reducing the data that gets downloaded on a user’s device, and shortening the time it takes to send and execute the content.

Typically, a page will have a mixture of elements with large images, often banners, carousels, hero images etc. To help with a faster LCP, these should be optimised by compressing the size, delivering in lighter formats, and providing real-time transformations for them to be responsive.

You should also look at reducing server response times, which cloud servers can help with. If a server takes quite some time to respond to requests, this can affect all the speed metrics negatively.

After testing out your site’s FID, you can analyse which pages need attention. Generally, it’s long JavaScript tasks that interfere, but you can find out the tasks that are causing delays through PageSpeed Insights and the ‘Avoid long main-thread tasks’ audit. By splitting up long tasks, this should help improve the metric, but you can also remove or delay non-critical, third-party scripts because these may prevent your own scripts from executing on time. You should also reduce unused CSS to avoid it from blocking the main thread.

When it comes to CLS, some key factors that affect the score are things like loading of fonts. When you’ve got numerous fonts used on a website, with different sizes and spacing, the font loads, it can cause layouts to shift throughout the whole site. Images that are dimensionless can also cause issues. If an image has no specification of height and width, the browser won’t reserve space for it. And when it loads, it can affect poor layout shifts by messing up the original positions.

There’s obviously so much more to improving your site’s CWVs, and there are plenty of quick wins for faster websites you can read up on to improve overall web performance, which will all add to helping your site rank and keep visitors coming back.