Enhancing Your LCP, CLS, and INP Scores
With Core Web Vitals’ recent switch from First Input Delay (FID) to Interaction to Next Paint (INP) for measuring visual responsiveness, it’s a good time for ecommerce sites to adapt their website optimization strategies. While addressing INP, businesses should also focus on improving Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) metrics to deliver the best possible user experience.
For LCP, which measures load time for the largest content element, key areas to focus on include:
- Optimizing images and video content through compression and proper sizing
- Minimizing render-blocking resources by deferring non-critical CSS/JavaScript
- Implementing pre-connect/pre-fetch resource hints for critical assets
- Leveraging browser caching and a content delivery network (CDN)
To enhance CLS, which quantifies unexpected layout shifts, consider the following:
- Setting specific size attributes for media elements
- Avoid inserting new content above existing pages without reserving space
- Using web font display properties to mitigate layout shifts from fonts loading.
- Utilizing CSS aspect ratio boxes to reserve space before images load
For the new INP metric, measuring responsiveness after user interactions, areas for improvement include:
- Breaking up long tasks into smaller, asynchronous chunks using requestIdleCallback or setTimeout commands
- Optimizing JavaScript execution and third-party scripts
- Implementing code splitting utilizing lazy-load commands for non-critical code
- Utilizing a web worker (a separate background thread) for computationally expensive operations that don’t require direct UI manipulation
As part of the website optimization process, it’s essential for ecommerce sites to enable browser performance monitoring. This allows businesses to identify specific areas for improvement by leveraging tools like Lighthouse to audit core web vitals scores, thereby enhancing the overall user experience.
By adopting a comprehensive approach that covers LCP, CLS, and INP, businesses can create ecommerce experiences that are not only fast and visually stable but also highly interactive. This optimization will significantly boost engagement, conversions, and search rankings. Remember, in a rapidly evolving digital landscape, consistent monitoring and iteration are the keys to staying ahead.
