Article By Bogdan Krstic
Fact-checked and written by a human ✔️
There’s a lot of buzz being spread around Core Web Vitals at the moment. But what the hell are Core Web Vitals anyway? Why do they matter for your water damage restoration SEO campaigns?
In today’s post, you’ll learn just that – what are Core Web Vitals, how they impact your business, and what to do about it.
What are Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are a set of factors that are used by Google to calculate your website’s speed and performance. These two are some of the biggest contributors to either a good or a bad user experience.
Starting from 2021, a website’s user experience will be one of the biggest ranking factors. If you want your restoration website to show up on the first page of Google for the most valuable keywords, you need to start focusing on the user experience.
Test your website's speed
Before you start optimizing your website for faster loading time, you should check your current performance.
Enter your website into the PageSpeed Insights tool and you’ll get accurate feedback on how your website is performing and what you should do to further improve performance.
Note that Google’s suggestions can seem pretty complicated if you don’t have any programming skills. This is why we suggest using a paid speed optimization plugin to make the process much easier for you.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is one of the best speed optimization plugins for WordPress users. It’s also inexpensive.
Once installed, the plugin will automatically apply some of the best speed optimization practices to your website.
If you wish to further improve your loading time, you can do so easily with this plugin.
NOTE: Prior to any optimizations, make sure to back up your website.
Wanna connect with other water damage business owners and learn digital marketing together for free?
If your answer is again YES then join our Facebook group. Inside the group, you’ll be able to connect with us and other business owners from your industry only, ask questions, download free learning material like our SEO checklist and other cool stuff.
What are you waiting for? Join our tribe!
Best speed optimization practices
Switch your DNS
DNS stands for Domain Name Server. It’s used for communication between users and web browsers.
Basically, DNS enables users to access a website by typing youtube.com instead of having to memorize its IP.
To have a great loading time, your DNS server should load a webpage quickly.
Cloudflare’s DNS is pretty fast. It’s also free and incredibly secure.
While DNS is just a piece of the puzzle, consider switching to Cloudflare or another fast DNS server.
Compress your images
One of the biggest reasons why your website may load slowly is because of the images you have on it.
To improve your website’s performance, you should compress your images. This action will reduce your images’ size without damaging quality.
Use a plugin like ShortPixel if you’re a WordPress user. It’s incredibly inexpensive and it will help you compress your images quickly and easily.
In WP Rocket, you can also enable “lazy loading” which loads images one-by-one as the user scrolls, instead of doing it all at once.
Use a CDN
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network.
Using a CDN will help you display your webpage’s content from the server nearest to the user.
Cloudflare’s DNS comes with a free CDN.
Minify your website’s code
Your website is made up of code. All of that code is stored in files.
If you are a WordPress user and you have a heavy theme and a lot of plugins installed, your website’s code is probably impacting your loading time.
WP Rocket comes incredibly helpful in this case. Even if you have zero coding knowledge, you’ll be able to optimize your website’s files just by selecting “Minify CSS” and “Minify JavaScript” options.
You can also select “Load JavaScript deferred” to help further optimize your files.
WARNING: Optimizing your website’s files CAN BREAK features on your website. Back up your website before making ANY changes.
Final thoughts
These were some of the best speed optimization practices. Note that your website’s speed depends on other factors such as:
- Hosting
- Theme and plugins
- CMS
Consider hiring a developer to help you with speed optimization if the steps mentioned in this video haven’t worked for you.
This ends the article. Hope that you got some value from it. In case you need any help, join our Facebook group and ask your questions there. Looking forward to seeing ya inside!
Bogdan is a restoration SEO expert with over 3 years of experience helping businesses grow. He is passionate about the restoration niche because of how underserved it is, and RepairSprout is the business he started and works on with joy every day. When he is not helping restoration companies grow, he works out, takes long walks, and watches Suits, which is completely ironic given how rarely he dresses up in a suit himself.