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8 Basic Components of Web Design Strategy

8 Basic Components of Effective Web Design Strategy

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Are you a seasoned web designer looking to refine your skills?

Are you a business owner looking to enhance your online presence?

Either way, this article intends to provide you with some valuable insights into the fundamental building blocks of effective web design strategy.

In the present-day world, users’ expectations from sites online are higher than ever before as of which, mastering the fundamentals of web design strategy is paramount if you want to stay ahead of the competition and deliver exceptional digital experiences to people online.

As the gateway to your brand’s online identity, your website, if well-designed, serves as a powerful tool for engaging visitors, driving conversions, and achieving business objectives. From intuitive navigation to captivating visuals and persuasive calls to action, every aspect of your web design plays a crucial role in shaping user perceptions and guiding their interactions.

Let’s look at some of the very basic elements resolving and optimizing your site for which can make your web design strategy effective.

Responsive Design

The present-day digital landscape where smartphone users usually dominate the online system requires the web design to be mobile responsive. Also, most of the business today occurs on smartphones rather than traditional desktops and tablets.

The idea behind mobile responsiveness is to retain the visitor session on your site longer by keeping them engaged. Retaining an audience on your website for a longer period increases the chance of them interacting with your website and doing business with you.

To accomplish an effective mobile responsive web design, what people often forget is that you need to consider factors like the website loading speed and the overall functionality of your website because slow speeds are simply non-negotiable when it comes to providing a better user experience in a mobile responsive web design.

Visual Hierarchy

Visual Hierarchy caters to a user-friendly design user interface and the principle behind it is to make the visual elements on your webpage appear in the order of their importance.

All this helps in making the ‘navigation through your website’ process easier for your audience. With easy navigation available, users are encouraged to engage and interact with your site.

Visual design plays a crucial role in capturing your users’ attention and guiding them towards conversion. One of the key elements of an effective visual design for the web is choosing the right theme. At ThemeIsles you can find a wide range of professionally designed and customizable themes that are not only visually stunning but also optimized for performance and offer enhanced UX.

Know that a user-friendly design of any website is a factor that Search Engines take into consideration in generating the SERPs. This simply means that if your website does not have a user-friendly design, it will affect your SEO ranking on the SERPs pages.

Once you have the right theme in place, here are some additional user-friendly elements you can implement to make your web design strategy effective and prevent your SEO or organic rankings from collapsing.

- Implementing a webpage design that appeals to human aesthetics
- Home page with clear site navigation
- Site search option

Clear CTAs

Embedding Calls-to-Actions also serves a key role in adding user-friendliness to your site. Not only that, but the entire click-to-convert journey usually gets complete only when a user interacts with the CTAs on your site to take action.

No CTAs on your site means that you are:

- Making your users feel directionless as you are not pointing or guiding them toward the steps to be taken to accomplish something. This makes your users feel confused and frustrated, ultimately increasing your webpage’s bounce rate and reducing your conversion rate.
- Missing on conversion opportunities because no CTAs on your webpage indicate that there exist no prompts that convince users to take a desired action like making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or maybe accessing some freebie or information source. Thus your website’s potential conversion opportunities are missed, thereby, diminishing the effectiveness of your webpage in achieving the desired goals
- Providing poor UX to users on your website due to a lack of smooth and intuitive UX when the absence of CTAs disrupts the flow of navigation and makes it difficult for users to complete desired actions.
- Making ineffective communication with your site visitors with the absence of CTAs that communicate the desired action clearly and persuasively.

Thus the need to strategically include CTAs on your website is evident for your web design strategy to be effective.

Simplified Navigation

What would be your reaction when using a site that lacks proper navigation or has no nav at all? You’ll become frustrated in no time!

At its core, the simplified navigation in web design aims to streamline the browsing journey for users by making it effortless for them to find the information or products they seek.

Simplified navigation on your site can be implemented by decluttering the nav menu and getting your content organized logically. That way, regardless of a user’s familiarity with your site, they can easily navigate through your site.

With simplified navigation in place, the bounce rate of your site can be improved by keeping users engaged and preventing frustrations and confusion.

By strategically incorporating CTAs within your site’s navigation structure, you can gently guide your users toward a conversion point without getting them overwhelmed with any unnecessary distractions.

Page Load Speeds

As discussed in the responsive design section, the loading speed of your website plays a critical role in aligning your web design strategy to meet the impact rate of maximum conversions as well as in the SEO ranking of your site.

As an internet user, you know that we have become accustomed to receiving the requested information over the internet in a timely fashion. Various research and case studies have shown that as page loading speed increases by seconds, the bounce rate increases to an extent where the overall conversion rate decreases by as high as 95%.

While avoiding fancy flash items, music, and large file-size videos can improve the speed-friendliness of your site, here are some best practices you can consider implementing for improving your site speed.

- Optimize uploaded media files on your site
- Make Use of a content delivery network (CDN)
- Minimize HTTP requests
- Enable Caching
- Make less use of plugins
- Use web optimization tools

I implemented all these simply with the installation of an all-in-one LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress plugin. If you want help configuring the plugin, refer to detailed article on this: Role of Core Web Vitals in SEO: Prioritizing UX for Search Rankings.

Using cloud hosting rather than traditional web hosting for your website is yet another possible and emergingly effective way of making the page loading speeds on your website lightning-fast. While this solution requires a little investment when you shift from your traditional web hosting to cloud hosting servers, trust me this expenditure would be worth it because of the unparalleled reliability and scalability you get with cloud-based hosting.

One of the best-performing managed cloud-based hosting providers is Cloudways which helps you craft a user experience that captivates and converts by saying goodbye to sluggish servers, offering a seamless browsing experience to your site visitors that compels them enough to keep coming back for more!

Incorporating Psychology in Web Design and How It Affects Site SEO?

Creating content that compels your users to keep coming back for more or simply stay on your website for a longer time duration is a must in web design. After all, it is usually some information that people seek when they land on your site surfing the net. And if your content is not interesting or appears unappealing and boring to visitors, they won’t even fancy maintaining eye contact with it for a little while, they’d just leave!

For this purpose, the content on your site needs to be interesting so that it serves the purpose of building trust with your site visitors and making you look expert in your field.

One way to make your web design content interesting is to incorporate psychology into your web design. By applying psychological principles to design elements in web design, like the color scheme for your website, typography, and layout, you can influence user perception, emotions, and decision-making processes.

Importantly, the psychological aspects of web design also intersect with your site’s SEO rankings. Websites prioritizing user experience, engagement, and satisfaction are more likely to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Factors like bounce rate, time on site, and click-through rate are all metrics that search engines consider when determining the relevance and quality of a website.

Therefore, by creating user-centric designs that prioritize clarity, intuitiveness, and value, designers can indirectly improve SEO performance and drive organic traffic. Here’s what you need to consider to create user-centric designs.

Color Psychology

Colors evoke emotions, moods, and perceptions in human beings. For instance, warm colors like red and orange are known to be associated with energy, excitement, and urgency. That’s why you’d often see that in marketing, CTAs are built keeping in mind the warm color psychology

Cool color tones like blue and green portray calmness, trust, and serenity, making them suitable for websites that exist to create credibility or promote relaxation. Strategically incorporating colors in your web design can help you influence user behavior, engagement, and brand perception, all resulting in an improved UX on your site.

Typography

The arrangement, layout, and appearance of text on your webpage that conveys information, establish hierarchy among page elements, and shapes the overall visual identity of your brand website comes under the typography style.

Your choice of font, font size, spacing, as well as font alignment impacts readability, mood, and brand personality. By making use of typography fonts that align with your website’s goals and target audience you can:

- Enhance readability
- Evoke desired emotions
- Create a cohesive and memorable brand identity

Social Proof

Often, in fact, most of the time, it is the testimonials of your products or services that convince visitors on your site to convert. This is simply because social proof elements like customer reviews, testimonials, UGC (user-generated content) as well as social media endorsements can help your brand build trust, credibility, and authority with users.

By placing social proof on your site, you basically alleviate your site users’ doubts, reassuring and encouraging them to take desired actions such as making a purchase or signing up for a service.

Scarcity and Urgency

Leveraging the fear of missing out (FOMO) to prompt immediate action from users is yet another powerful web design strategy that works wonders. Scarcity implies creating the perception of limited resource availability, whereas, urgency instills a sense of time pressure like a close approaching deadline.

By making use of techniques like countdown timers, limited-time offers, low-stock notifications, and last-chance offer alerts, you can trigger a sense of scarcity or urgency for site visitors and users, thereby, compelling them to act quickly before they miss out on valuable opportunities.

By strategically incorporating scarcity and urgency techniques in your CTAs, and promotional banners, you can convince users to engage, convert, and drive sales to your brand.

In essence, incorporating psychology in your web design strategy not only enhances user experience and conversion rates but also positively impacts SEO, contributing to the overall success and effectiveness of a website.

A/B testing and data-driven design

Web Design Strategy: A/B testing, Split testing — Image by macrovector on Freepik

Every website owner wants to achieve the best results by employing effective web design strategy in place so that their website offers a great user experience to visitors and users along with perfect features, smooth design, and functionalities.

However, several dynamics control the overall success of websites online so there is no one fixed, hard, and fast rule to success. Rather, the success of websites online is often bound to multiple paths. And to figure out which path suits best with the website’s overall success, A/B testing is the key.

A/B testing or split testing is an important tool in web development with the help of which you can test elements like headlines, call-to-action buttons, and page layouts by creating multiple versions of these elements and randomly directing some users to sample A and some to sample B. By studying the variations in the user engagement and conversions received by both samples, you can determine which version performs better.

A/B testing is a powerful tool in a web design strategy that provides you valuable insights into user behavior on your website. These insights can be utilized to enhance UX which leads to more conversions, improved business results, and higher audience satisfaction; thus a data-driven design strategy.

Advantages of A/B testing in refining web design strategy elements for optimal conversion rates

A/B testing allows you to run controlled experiments on your website and in return get insights and information into the choices and behavior of your site users which ultimately helps your site in achieving optimal conversion rates.

Below we will discuss the advantages of A/B testing in refining web design strategy elements for optimal conversions.

- It helps you improve the user experience on your website
- Being a data-driven strategy process, you can make use of the data obtained from A/B testing to make smart decisions about the required changes or updates needed on your web pages. This saves you the trouble of relying on your gut instincts only. That way, you’d be relying on real-time user feedback and their behavior.
- Through A/B testing, you can get your conversion rates to skyrocket when you get to identify the most successful approaches to success that actually work with testing. These approaches include testing the elements on your landing pages or checkout page to identify elements or areas where in the conversion journey users tend to abandon your site without taking any action. Improving the highlighted areas or elements as of A/B testing, you can increase the number of users completing the desired action like making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter, thus increasing your overall conversion rate.
- A/B testing aids your website’s ongoing development process by enlightening you with insights through testing about what web elements need modification so that your website remains effective and relevant for users.
- A/B testing allows you to stay ahead of the competition

Now that you’ve understood how A/B testing is crucial to observing user behavior patterns on your website, and to creating personalized experiences tailored to your audience needs, you also need to know what key metrics to track and analyze in A/B testing for a web design strategy that converts.

Key metrics to track and analyze in A/B testing for web design strategy optimization

Before launching an A/B testing campaign for your website, you’ll need to first know which key metrics you need to test or analyze for your website. Here’s the list of metrics that can be tracked and analyzed with A/B testing or split testing:

Bounce Rate

Definition – The percentage of visitors on your website that navigate away without interacting with the elements on your website

Why Track and Analyze this? – Your site’s bounce rate indicates the level of engagement and relevance of its content to visitors. High bounce rates may be a signal that your site design and content are not resonating with the audience on the site.

How to Analyze it? – Monitor the bounce rate corresponding to both A and B test variations to figure out which design leads to lower bounce rates and higher engagement.

Conversion Rate

Definition – The percentage of visitors on your website that complete a desired action like buying a product, filling out a contact form, or signing up for a newsletter.

Why Track and Analyze this? – This is one of the fundamental metrics that you’ll be measuring with A/B testing as it directly evaluates the effectiveness of your design variation, for samples under testing, in driving user actions and conversions.

How to Analyze it? – Monitor the conversion rates achieved corresponding to both A and B test sample variations to determine which design helped convert more visitors into customers or leads.

Click-Through Rate

Definition – The number of site visitors who click on a specific link or a web element on your site.

Why Track and Analyze this? – This is also a key metric to measure with A/B testing as it helps evaluate the effectiveness of calls-to-action, menu navigations, as well as other interactive elements that guide site users toward any desired action on your website.

How to Analyze it? – Monitor the CTR of key elements between test sample A and sample B to assess which design encourages more user interactions.

Average session duration

Definition – It is the average amount of time visitors spend on your webpage during their single session.

Why Track and Analyze this? – This is useful in understanding your site users’ engagement and interest in the content or your webpage design.

How to Analyze it? – Evaluate the average session durations of sample test variations to determine which design keeps users engaged for longer a period of time.

Goal Completeness

Definition – It is defined as the number of times users on your site successfully accomplish predefined goals, such as completing a purchase or submitting a form

Why Track and Analyze this? – Goal completions directly measure the effectiveness of your webpage in fulfilling specific objectives.

How to Analyze it? – Track the number of goal completions for each test variation to identify which design drives more successful conversions.

Once you identify which specific metric you need to track and analyze, specific to your website, you’ll then need to set up an A/B testing campaign.

Lead generation software like OptinMonster can help you set up your lead generation campaign in no time within which you can utilize the built-in split testing feature to test out variations.

You can refer to their detailed article for setting up a split testing campaign with OptinMonster for your web pages.

Tracking and analyzing key metrics in A/B testing is essential for optimizing your web design strategy for maximizing performance and conversions. By understanding the impact of design variations on conversion rates, engagement metrics, and goal completions, you can make informed decisions that will help in making your site more effective and user-friendly.

Mobile Optimization

With the majority of internet surfers accessing the web through smartphones, you need to prioritize mobile optimization for your website so that it provides a seamless and engaging experience to your audience.

Other than the user experience, mobile optimization also helps in increasing the conversion rates on your site. Let’s explore the importance of mobile optimization in the era of smartphone dominance and discuss techniques for designing mobile-friendly websites to maximize conversions.

Importance of mobile optimization in the era of smartphone dominance

Smartphones have more or less changed the way people interact with content available to them online. From social media browsing to product shopping, users have become accustomed to fast, intuitive, and responsive experiences delivered to them right in the comfort of their smartphones.

As such, mobile optimization of your website has become crucial to staying competitive and meeting the evolving needs of your audience. Incorporating mobile optimization in your web design strategy you get:

- Increased conversions – Incorporating mobile optimization in your web design strategy helps remove the barriers to conversion by providing smooth user journeys. This is simply because mobile users on your site will like to engage with and convert only when your site provides them an easy navigation, quick loading speed, as well as relevant and compelling content. This caters to a win-win strategy for your website when you get an opportunity to capitalize on your conversion rates and boost revenues one way or the other.

- Improved Search Engine rankings – A website that is not optimized for mobile users is likely to receive lesser attention (lower visibility and rankings) from search engines compared to websites that are built with a mobile responsive design. So, to make your website receive maximum SE attention and be widely visible online, you need to give serious thought to incorporating mobile responsiveness design on your website.
- Enhanced user experience – Any user on your website will depict a higher retention rate and increased brand royalty only when your website design offers them an enjoyable browsing experience regardless of the device they might be using. Mobile responsive design can help you accomplish exactly that.

Techniques for designing mobile-friendly websites to maximize conversions

Once you decide to incorporate a mobile responsiveness feature into your web design, it is essential to prioritize usability, performance, and conversion optimization. Here are some techniques that might prove beneficial:

- Build your website for speed as it is the biggest factor of any website in ranking it higher in search rankings and for optimal user experience,
- Add an easy navigation interface for users to have a smooth click-to-conversion journey
- Make it secure and provide a safe environment to your site users so that they can trust your platform and transact using the authorized payment gateways securely whenever necessary.
- Add a search function so that it becomes easier for your users to find what they are looking for without any bother.
- Strategically guide your users with clear call-to-actions (CTAs) to get the desired result like signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, etc. This also does not mean that you overdo it and overwhelm your site visitors with multiple CTAs resulting in them getting confused and leaving your website for good.
- Consider a clean font with a best-fit font size that adjusts well on both mobile and desktop screens so that your site is mobile responsive and includes a well-structured layout for desktops as well.

Mobile-specific considerations for CTAs, navigation, and content presentation

Although overall mobile optimization strategies have already been discussed so forth, however, there are several mobile-specific considerations that you need to keep in mind specifically when designing navigation, CTAs, and content presentation for your mobile-responsive website. These mobile-specific considerations include the following:

- Thumb-friendly navigation – This requires you to place important navigation links within easy reach of your site users’ thumb to enhance usability and reduce frustration.

- Condensed content – Most of the time you need to hide certain elements on mobile devices or tablets when making your website mobile responsive. This is necessary because mobile screens usually have limited space. So, it becomes crucial to prioritize and condense content for optimal user readability.
- Clear and visible CTAs – CTAs on your mobile responsive site should be prominently displayed and easy to tap with a finger for users on your site. You can use contrasting colors, ample whitespace, and large, legible fonts to make your CTAs stand out and encourage users on your site to take action.

After understanding these 8 basic components that make for an effective web design strategy, it’s time that your learn about the user behavior on your site and how to track analytics related to it. This is important when you want to design your web strategy that optimized for maximum impact level.

Conclusion

Wrapping up, in learning about basic elements of effective web design strategy it is clear that the journey towards a successful online presence is muti-faceted and requires a harmonious blend of aesthetics, functionality, and strategic vigilance.

From the critical importance of responsive design that meets with your site users expectations regardless of the device they get online with, to the necessity of intuitive navigation that guides them through your digital space with ease, each component plays a pivotal role in sculpting a web experience that resonates deeply with your audience.

Coupled with engaging content that speaks directly to the needs and interests of your visitors, along with a keen attention to SEO strategies, a well-crafted web design strategy not only captivates but converts.

As we continue to navigate the ever-evolving digital landscape, remember that the foundation of any effective web strategy lies in understanding and implementing these core principles.

By doing so, you set the stage for a digital presence that not only stands out in a crowded online world but also achieves your business goals, fostering growth and building lasting connections with your audience.

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Role of Core Web Vitals in SEO: Prioritizing UX for Search Rankings

This site contains affiliate links, view the disclosure for more information.

The modern-day updated, Google’s algorithm and ranking factors make use of subset of factors collectively termed: as Core Web Vitals to measure the speed, interactivity, and visual stability of your webpage. Previously, the Google’s algorithm and ranking factor of a webpage were mostly based on semantic search algorithms.

However, ever since Google has started prioritizing the UX (User Experience) to discern a webpage’s ranking, factors like the page load speed and mobile responsiveness, that directly relate with User Experience criteria, is what Google’s algorithm now utilizes as a guidance to discern a website’s quality signals.

Officially coming into effect as of May 2020 by Google, the Core Web Vitals basically serve Google’s way of scrutinizing your webpage’s overall UX.

The Three Core Web Vitals of Google

The three core web vitals of Google include the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and First Input Delay (FID). An advanced version of FID termed as Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is scheduled by Google to replace the former by March 2024.

Let’s understand what each of the metric term implies and how they affect your website’s SEO and (Search Engine Result Page) SERP rankings. Later in this post I’d be sharing how you can easily resolve most of the issues and have your Core Web Vitals metrics optimized for best site performance and excellent UX.

Largest Contentful Paint

The time taken by ‘the largest element’ on your webpage to load is defined by the largest contentful paint, LSP. For your webpage to function optimally, this value is required to be less than 2.5 seconds. Exactly at 2.5seconds, it will do too, however, beyond that your core web vital assessment would either ‘require improvement’ (orange grade – LCP between 2.5 and 4.0seconds) or fail the assessment with a score above 4.0seconds (red grade)

You may ask: What does LCP has to do with SEO?

Other than helping you with delivering a better user experience, Google utilizes the LCS score factor in determining a ranking factor of websites and so it has a direct role to play in improving the SEO experience of webpages on your site. See that’s the whole point about why it matters!

And this is quite understandable because, think of it this way, staring at an almost blank page with the page’s biggest element not being loaded fast enough could make the visitors or users of your site feel annoyed enough to leave it for good. This counts because you know that in browsing, a matter of only a few seconds; brings about a significant change in visitors/users’ decisions!

In fact, the Largest Contentful Paint, which accounts for almost 25% of Google’s Page Speed Insights score metrics, is considered to be the most important of the three performance metrics.

Finding and measuring Your site’s LCP

While there are various ways and tools to finding and measuring your site’s LCP score metric, I find Google’s Page Speed Insights the easiest way of getting the score metric percentage alongside a detailed enlisting of areas that require improvement.

Now Page Speed Insights is a completely free tool with no limits, whatsoever, which means that regardless of having an ownership of a website, you can hop on and find a score metric of any webpage that you’d like to explore.

If a site you are analyzing has no active users, the data generated by Google’s Page Speed Insights is referred to as lab data. A performance data of site that is collected in a controlled environment is referred to as lab data wherein Page Insights simulates the performance of the site under observation with predefined device (the device you use for analyzing the site) and network settings (network connectivity speed that your device has, etc).

If the site under observation does have online real-time users, then the performance metric data that the PageSpeed Insights will generate will be a Real-Field data. A field data is a data derived from an aggregated data collected by Chrome’s CrUX (Chrome User Experience) report. All the data in the CrUX is highly valuable as it captures a real-time user experience data.

The reason behind the difference in the lab data and field data metric scores is simply the predefined conditions in lab data and real-time UX in the field data. As predefined conditions include dependability on factors like the internet connection, etc. it is rare that your lab data would reflect a 100% metric score and that’s an okay thing, above 90% is all good!

As for the field data, it is possible for sites (especially the new domains, and not the older ones) to have no real-time users at the time of analyzing. In that case, PageSpeed Insights won’t show you any field data and only lab data would be made available to you. That too would be okay because normally, the difference between field data and lab data is not significant.

Later in the post, I will cover that out of the three core web vitals metrics, lab data does not provides First Input Delay (FID) metric because it is a metric that requires real users interaction to be measured.

However, if you own a site, the Search Console can prove quite useful as it gives you a performance graph of all pages collectively, showing how many of them have a good score (green grade), how many need improvement (orange grade), and how many of them are offering poor UX (red grade).

Factors that affect your site’s LCP

Without getting into much details, let’s find out the main factors that affect a site’s LCP score:

Slow Server response Time

Whenever you lunch a query or search for a website in your browser, your browser sends a request to server for it to respond with the content requested. Sometimes the server is slow and your browser fails to receive the content requested by the server quicky enough to render a site on your screen This delay in load time affects the site’s LCP score.

Don’t worry about how to resolve this issue yet, I’ll provide you with an easy solution to this by the end of this post.

Render-blocking JavaScript and CSS

Immediately after your browser receives the requested content from a server, it does not render it on your screen instantly. Rather, rendering any content requires the browser to analyze or you can say parse and convert it to a readable HTML structure of the page. Only after this parsing is the content rendered and made fully available on your screen. During this parsing process, some scripts or stylesheets might try blocking the HTML parsing process, thereby delaying the parsing process. This delay plus the server response time delay discussed previously both affect the LCP performance metric of the webpage you are analyzing. Together they slow down the loading process. The scripts and stylesheets are what make up the render-blocking resources.

More on how to resolve these later in the post.

Slow Resource Load Time

Other resources on the webpage like the images, videos, and block-level elements like the HTML and CSS files that are rendered and loaded above the fold often take additional time to load (slow loading) which again affects your LCP score.

While keeping your file size of uploaded images, and videos low can help tackle this issue, however, as for the block-level elements like the HTML and CSS, installing and configuring the LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress plugin can work wonders.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Coming onto the next metric, the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), do you happen to have any visible elements on your webpage that change their position or size that simultaneously affects the position or size of other content surrounding it?

Say, for example, an ad loads above the fold and pushes some of the content on the page further down. Or maybe you tried to click on a link or a button but ended up clicking on a wrong link or button because a new bigger image causes the existing content on the page to move down.

If you’ve had experienced this, you know how annoying it gets!

And since Google’s Core Web Vials are there to monitor the UX that your webpage serves your users with, Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is the second important part of it. You can say that the CLS metric actually looks for the visual stability of your webpage.

The number of unexpected layouts shifts that happen on a webpage affects its CLS score metric. The term unexpected here refers to the layout shifting happening without you clicking or interacting with the page.

Since Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a highly relevant metric for UX, it accounts for 25% of the PageSpeed score and is therefore an important factor to consider for your webpages’ SEO performance.

Finding and measuring Your site’s CLS

Again, for finding and measuring the CLS score metric for your website, I personally use and recommend PageSpeed Insights, although other tools are available.

Other tools either require you to sign up to get score metric results, or they’d stick to providing you with one type of data which could be lab data, field data, or CrUX (Chrome User Experience) Report. PageSpeed Insights is free, and it provides you with both field data and lab data along with the pin pointing of elements that cause layout shift in the diagnostics report. For instance, consider the field data of a reference website (Image Source: Google)

Core Web Vitals: PageSpeed Insights Issues Image

In the reference image above, you can clearly see how PageSpeed Insights enlists all the elements, each with its CLS contribution score, that cause layout shifts. This makes it easier for you to understand how each of the element contribute to the overall calculated CLS score.

A good CLS score range is either equal to or less than 0.1 (Green Grade)

For a range between 0.1 to 0.25, the CLS score metric would bear a “needs improvement” status (orange grade) and of course for grades even higher than 0.25, CLS would be marked as “poor” (red grade) by PageSpeed Insights.

Just like LCP, CLS can also be found for all pages on the site using Google’s Search Console. This makes it quite easier for you to analyze the site wide performance of the Core Web Vitals for the domain/website that you own.

What makes Search Console the best and easiest way to analyze the core web vitals is that it allows you to view a complete list of your site’s URLs that are affected by the same issue. That way you do not get to input and analyze individually the URL of each page on PageSpeed Insights.

For example, under the core web vitals tab in the Search Console, you can explore a detailed report of your site’s performance on both Mobile and Desktop. Say, for example, in the Mobile report of your core web vitals, you may find a detected CLS issue that reads: “CLS issue: more than 0.1 (mobile)”. Refer to the image below: (Image Source: Google)

See the how search console enlists URLs facing the same issue under one type. The above figure shows two CLS issues, both encountered on mobile device: one with CLS score more than 0.1 which is an orange grade, stating “Needs Improvement” and the other one with 0.25 s which is marked as a poor grade.

Having understood the method of measuring and finding CLS, let’s move onto the factors that affect the CLS score.

Factors that affect your site’s CLS

Added animations (Content that gets injected dynamically)

Now this does not imply not to use animations at all on your webpage!

Not all added animations contribute to your CLS score, that’s because Google ignores the CSS transform property. This means that by using a CSS transform property for your animations, you can have a control over your CLS score.

But, I understand that just like me, most people do not want to get into these ‘code transformation’ things, and so later in the post, I’ll share with you an even easier solution to overcome issues related to CLS score adjustments.

Images and Videos Used without specifying dimensions

These make for the most common reasons for Layout Shifts.

When you do not specify specifically the dimension size of images and videos for Mobile View, browsers normally self-assign and reserve a space for these media files. Once the media file gets loaded, the reserved space might be more than required and as a result, the content which was loaded and displayed earlier than the media file, shifts.

It’s therefore a good practice when optimizing your website for mobile Responsiveness to specify the dimensions of the media file to be displayed on the webpage.

Actions that require waiting for a server response before DOM gets updated

This especially happens in the case of advertisements placed on websites. The reason again here is the “not specified” dimensions for the proper deploying of such content on your webpage.

This makes it evident the essentiality of allocating a space with proper dimensions to elements that are intended to engage users. If not done properly, they ruin your site’s overall User Experience (UX). Ads, embeds, and iframes appearing on webpages without proper dimensions specified all contribute to layout shifts, making search engines aware of the bad UX performance available on certain site.

Use of Fonts that cause Flash Of Unstyled Text (FOUT) or Flash of Invisible Text (FOIT)

Usually during webpage rendering, the custom font style you used in designing your page takes some time to load.

In the meantime, fallback font is used by the browser to display your content to users. Once the custom font gets loaded, it replaces the fallback font and the content appears exactly with a font you designed your webpage with. This phase of your custom font getting loaded and the fallback font appearing on your webpage is referred to as FOUT.

Now the amount of space taken up by fallback font would most probably vary compared to the space taken up by your custom font when loaded. Inevitably this causes layout shift.

There is another term related to webpage fonts: the FOIT. Flash Of Invisible Text occurs when during page rendering, no text appears on your screen, again due to the custom font being in the rendering phase.

Even though CLS metric score is calculated for both Mobile and Desktop, however, the most common impact of CLS occurs on mobile devices because mobile devices have several challenges like smaller viewport, sometimes an arduous network connectivity, and a weaker Central Processing Unit compared to Desktops.

To fix issues related to font rendering, it is recommended that you pre-load the fonts and optimize them. What this means is that you tell the browser (through certain code or setting of a plugin) to load the fonts as one of the top priority resources. That way, the browser will load the fonts prior to when the first meaningful paint gets painted.

The first meaningful paint happens when a webpages’ primary content is fully rendered, loaded and displayed successfully on your screen. If the fonts have been loaded already prior to this, your page gets loaded with the custom-styled font with the settings saved at the back end, and so no layout shift occurs.

First Input Delay (FID)

Did you ever experience a delay in the response time of a browser when you land on a webpage and click on a certain link?

While you expect the browser to respond back and entertain your request almost instantly, you often come cross a situation where nothing happens, and yet the browser seems to be a bit busy processing somethings in the background (‘somethings’ basically are JavaScript Executions carried out by the browsers in the background to fully render the webpage).

First Input Delay is the delay caused by browser in processing a user’s first input. This delay is usually caused due to the browsers’ memory being utilized in processing other requests related to page rendering i.e. page loading.

You know how annoying it gets when you click on a link, waiting for something to happen on a page, but the browser stands there idle!

As its name implies, FID requires a user interaction on a webpage to be measured by core web vital monitoring algorithms. That is why, only when the field data is available, FID would be available.

You might have seen in the core web vitals report generate by some tools a metric known as the Total Blocking Time (TBT). Well, it is a lab metric, a proxy used to measure interactivity and responsiveness without having anything to do with a user interaction.

Tools like the Lighthouse which can’t measure First Input Delay, make use of the TBT lab metric. In such cases, a good TBT value accounts for an acceptable FID grade.

In order to make better your FID score, one of the options is to improve your TBT score as it accounts for almost 30% of the overall performance score generated by PageSpeed Insight which is more than both LCP and CLS. You can refer to the scoring calculator here.

FID score is said to be in good grade when it is equal to or less than 0.1s = 100ms

For FID scores greater than 0.3s = 300milliseconds, your page speed would be marked as poor by core web vitals monitoring tools.

One question that often pops up in our minds is that how TBT is used by tools to measure the field data and that if it has the same score window as that of FID mentioned above. Let’s first get this straight for you!

Understanding a good TBT score

As mentioned previously, TBT is not dependent on user input. FID, however, as its name suggests is dependent on user’s first input.

What this implies is that TBT is the window frame in which user interaction on page is ‘blocked’, therefore, not allowing users to interact with the page even when the tap, click, press keyboard buttons, etc. As soon as this time frame window, which is basically a TBT, is passed, user interaction gets enabled on the page. Summing up the total ‘blocked times’ for user interaction helps determine TBT score.

In technical terms, you could say that the sum of all the timestamps in between the FCP (when you get to interact with the first content on the page) and Time to Interactive (the time taken by the entire page to become fully interactive) determines a score value of TBT.

TBT also has a three-grade score value in which case it would bear a good score for a timeframe value of less than or equal to 0.3seconds(300ms). For a range between 0.3s(300ms) to 0.6s(600ms) TBT score would require an improvement. Above 600ms, it would be marked as a poor grade TBT score.

To sum up, you can say that both FID and TBT consider page responsiveness and interactivity with FID actually taking into account the user interaction and TBT considering user input. Therefore, both metrics though, appear to be identical, but are technically different.

Measuring the First Input delay FID

Since FID is a field metric that requires user interactions to be measured, tools like Lighthouse, Chrome DevTools, and WebPageTest, etc that can’t measure field data can not help you in determining your webpage’s FID score. These tools as well as the Google’s PageSpeed Insights, however, can measure TBT, the proxy metric.

Few tools like the field data of PageSpeed Insights, Search Console, and Chrome User Experience (CrUX) report can help in measuring FID.

PageSpeed Insights is the easiest and free method to measure your FID, so long as your site has active users at the time of scan, because only then will the tool measure field data.

The TBT score of your page comes under the Lab Data report of PageSpeed Insights, for it being a proxy metric.

Search Console can prove useful in determining the site wide FID score and its performance. Similarly, as was discussed previously in the measuring of CLS using Search Console, you could encounter a similar error message for your site URLs in the case of FID measurement. Refer to the image below:

By clicking on the error message highlighted above, Search Console will enlist all your site URLs that are affected by the same issue. For instance, take a look at the following image(Source: Google Images)

The above image shows that a particular website has a total of 742 URLs affected by the same issue and that is FID issue: longer than 100ms.

What’s more to it is that, down the ‘Example URL’ column, Search Console even enlists the exact URLs facing the issue which makes it pretty easier for users to get the score metric improved as needed.

Factors that affect First Input Delay

As is understood so far that FID is the delay that occurs entirely due to the browser being busy with entertaining page rendering and loading requests in which browsers get to deal with the processing of heavy JavaScript files.

Now these JavaScript files are heavy enough to flood the memory cache of browsers so much so forth that there does not remain any room for entertaining any additional requests. As a result, interactivity on the page is poor, main thread is busy processing JavaScript files and the page is blocked.

This makes one thing straightforwardly easy to understand: reducing time of JavaScript files execution can help with improving the FID score metric.

So, you might wonder: where do these JavaScript files come from and why do they take so long to execute?

Here’s the thing, all the web page content on the world wide web is basically created using a scripting language called JavaScript. So, whenever you type certain URL in your browser, your browser first looks up the IP address for that specific domain you entered as part of the URL.

After finding the IP address for the domain, your browser than initiates a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) with a server after which it sends the HTTP request to the server. The server than processes the request and sends back a response to the browser.

Once your browser receives a response from the server in the form of HTML which is a structure of the page. Your browser than starts parsing and rendering the received HTML. To load the requested webpage as it was designed by the developer, during parsing and rendering process, your browser references other JavaScript, CSS, image resources and additional requests. That’s how complex JavaScript files execution flood your browsers cache memory.

For an even detailed understanding on how your browser returns your requested URL refer to this post.

Back to the matter of FID score metric, if you have had experience building a website using WordPress, or similar software, you know that plugins are there to make your life even easier with website development. But what you might not know is that most plugins, especially the ones that are JavaScript based, add an additional burden to initially rendered JavaScript files. The result is an even prolonged JavaScript file execution time or in simple terms an increased FID score metric.

Did you ever read in forums people asking questions about getting somethings resolved on their website without installing any additional plugins?

Not wanting to increase a burden on JavaScript files is one of the probable reasons behind it! And that’s logical too, you should prefer getting things done without plugins where you have the counterpart course of action to it and use plugins only when it becomes necessary to use one.

Then there are theme files which too can affect your site’s FID score. That’s because heavy themes again have larger JavaScript files. Additionally, some themes are designed in a way that aren’t efficient enough in terms of design which affects the main thread – again affecting your site’s FID score.

Reducing FID and improving the score metric requires that you work on improving how browsers deal with JavaScript files. If the execution period of JavaScript files unfolds smoothly and faster, the browser can actually allow interactivity and page responsiveness at its earliest. e

Improving the First Input Delay Score metric for your site

In order to improve the FID, you can take the following actions:

Deferring JavaScript – this makes the browser load the render-blocking resources after the most relevant content on page has been rendered and the user interactions are unblocked on the page.
Removing Unused JavaScript – this allows restoring page rendering and downloading time by avoiding browsers a burden of processing unused JS files.
Delaying JavaScript Execution Time Until User Interaction – Ever see a webpage load when you scroll? That is basically a good example of delayed JS file execution in page rendering. This delay is added to the JS files that affect loading and execution time for no reason. Consequently, unless a user interacts with the page (scrolling for example) only then will the remaining JS files get executed.
Minify JS – This simply involves reducing JS script coding lines by eradicating line breaks, white spaces, or any comments. The process simply allows making file size smaller and much more efficient.
Removing or reducing unused CSS – Helps in improving loading time which improves FID score metric and user interactivity on page when it gets loaded.
Asynching or Deferring CSS – Provides the same function of render-resource blocking as in the case of ‘Deferring JavaScript’ but for CSS files.
Compressing text files – Compressing files makes them smaller and easier to be transmitted thereby, allowing for faster loading time
Breaking up Long Tasks – In order to save the main thread form getting blocked due to heavy long tasks and consequently block user interaction on page, splitting longer chunks of data into smaller, more efficiently execution able small tasks.

Improving your site’s overall Core Web Vitals with LiteSpeed Cache

Core Web Vitals: Improve your Page Speed with LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress plugin

When SEO is in question, you can’t take errors for granted because if it weren’t for the role of core web vitals in SEO, improving your site’s overall speed metric would not have been this common of an issue faced by website owners.

With plenty of tools and plugins out there that can help you improve your Core Web Vitals, I prefer using LiteSpeed Cache Plugin.

That’s simply because installing and configuring this lightweight plugin helped me improve my site’s core web vitals report from 86% all the way up to 99% for Desktop, and 75 to 96% for Mobile device.

Here’s the screen shot of my site’s Core Web Vitals report after installing the LiteSpeed Cache Plugin. (I used PageSpeed Insights + note that lab data was not available as my website is brand new)

For Desktop:

Core Web Vitals page Speed Test Report - Desktop

For Mobile Device:

Core Web Vitals page Speed Test Report - Mobile

Here’s how you can download, install, and configure the Litespeed Cache plugin on your WordPress site.

Downloading, Installing and Configuring the LiteSpeed Cache Plugin

Download/Get the plugin from the company’s official website here. If you have a single domain, small, portfolio or blogging website like mine, you can start with a free starter pack for now.

Or if you own multiple domains and want to get the plugin for all of them, you can choose the Site Owner Pack.

Once you have downloaded the plugin zip file. Go to your WordPress Dashboard, hover over Plugins and select Add New Plugin from the pop-up cascading menu.

LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress Plugin Uploading

Click on Upload Plugin and give path to the downloaded file for it to upload on your WordPress.

Install the plugin and activate it.

After activation you will see the “LiteSpeed Cache” option in the left menu of your wp-admin. Click on it and you’ll be taken to the dashboard of the plugin.

Now to configure your LiteSpeed Cache plugin, let’s go through each of the steps in the left menu one by one.

First off, the plugin also provides you with a ‘preset’ option. This is good if you really do not want to bother looking into how the plugin optimizes your page speed score, you can just select one of the preset and get it going with few clicks.

The next tab in the preset option ‘Import/Export’ is useful when you are deploying a lot of websites and all are built using the same theme. This feature helps you configure you LiteSpeed Cache only once and export all the settings applied in a file and then install/import that file with all the configuration in every other website you want the LiteSpeed Cache plugin configured. Simple as that!

But, if you do bother about how the plugin functions exactly and how it affects the content displayed on your website, it is better (and recommended) to go over the steps one by one so that if there’d be something mishappening on your website you’d know what option to toggle on/off for the site to run smoothly.

Moving onto the ‘General’ settings, here you’ll first need to enable the automatic updates for the plugin. (If you think you log in quite often and can update the plugin manually, you can skip this)

Next, we will be using the CDN of QUIC.cloud and for that you’ll need the domain key. QUIC.cloud allows caching dynamic WordPress pages. To get the domain key, press the ‘Request Domain Key’ button and wait for few seconds before you refresh the page.

Once you refresh the page after waiting for some seconds, domain key will be automatically added and the button ‘Link to QUIC.cloud’ would be enabled. Pressing on the button you’ll be redirected to the QUIC.cloud website and there you’ll create an account by signing up (completely free). If you already have an account with QUIC.cloud, signing in is what you’d be doing.

After signing up, you’ll receive an email for account confirmation. Confirm and sign in to your QUIC.cloud dashboard. After login your QUIC.cloud would be successfully linked with your website. Great! Now let’s move on to other setting in the General Tab.

Toggle On the following: Guest Mode(benefits people who visit your website for the first time), Guest Optimization, Notification.

Here’s a screen shot of how the general settings tab looks after configuration.

LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress - General Settings

Next, we head onto the ‘Tuning Setting’ tab in General Setting. In the tuning tab, the first option you get is ‘Guest Mode User Agents’. This allows you to remove some of the tools from the Guest Mode. For example, if you want to disable the GTMetrics tool in the Guest Mode, you can simply remove it from the list and press save changes. This setting is entirely up to you to configure.

After the General settings of LSCache have been configured, we move onto the ‘Cache’ setting from the left WordPress menu for LiteSpeed Cache Plugin.

The first thing you’ll see here, if you are following this tutorial step by step from the beginning, would be a warning: LSCache Caching functions on this page are currently unavailable.

This warning happens because your site is most probably using the Google Cloud for caching and not the LiteSpeed web server. To get over with this warning, go to the CDN settings from the left sub-menu of LiteSpeed cache plugin in WordPress and simply Toggle On the QUIC.coud CDN. Save the changes made and head back to Cache setting.

Now the warning message must be gone. In the cache setting, all button settings would be by default Toggled ON. However, ‘Cache Mobile’ setting by default is turned OFF. If you are using Guest Mode, you should put your Cache mobile setting to ‘ON’. But if you are using a responsive theme like Divi, or Elementor, or Astra, you can keep this option OFF. For now, we are using the Guest Mode so I’ll toggle this to ON.

Save the changes made and move onto the next tab “TTL” tab in Cache settings which is basically a Time To Live. In the TTL setting, ‘Default Public Cache TTL’ is by default set to a value ‘604800’ seconds = 1 week.

What this means is that when a visitor visits your site, the files downloaded will be cached for a maximum of 1 week. So, if the visitor returns to your site within the 1-week time frame, the browser will not have to reload the files and therefore, page loading will be fast. However, after 1 week time period, the cached files would be purged and upon re-visiting the site files would have to re-load from scratch. You can increase or decrease the timings of retaining and purging the cache as your site might require. The rest of the TTL settings are good and no changes are required for them so, we move onto the next tab ‘Purge’ settings.

In the ‘Purge’ setting, first off you’ll need the ‘Purge All on Upgrade’ button toggled ON. This is important because when you update your theme or some plugin, you’d definitely need the entire cache cleaned. This is an important feature that any caching plugin should always have.

Sometimes it so happens that web developers find the need to purge certain URLs on a scheduled basis. LiteSpeed Cache can help in such scenarios. All you got to do is get to the TTL setting tab under the Cache settings, and there you’ll find a ‘Scheduled Purge URLs’. Add in the URL manually then in the ‘Scheduled Purge Time’ setting, set the time at which you want the URL to be purged from cache. In a general setting, we leave it as is as we do not want any of the specific URLs purged from cache.

The rest of the settings don’t require any changes, so, save the changes, and move onto the next tab ‘Excludes’. The initial settings would remain as is/no settings required but towards the end of the page scrolling you’ll come across a ‘Do Not Cache Roles’.

Now when you are working a lot on your website changing pages, adding new things, or simply when you are an administrator, you want no caching involved in your website. That’s because caching usually delays image loads, etc. and as a result if you design a page, it might not appear to you the way you designed it (due to delayed image loads, etc.). In such a case, you might think there is some issue with your website whereas, in actual case there is no issue, just caching plugin doing its thing in the background.

So, the last option in the ‘Excludes’ tab is to select the ‘Administrator’ role only under ‘Do not Cache Roles’. That way administrators won’t experience any caching on the website when they are run-testing it. Save the changes applied and then move onto the next tab settings ‘ESI’.

The ESI (Edge Slide Includes) settings come in quite handy when you have a website where lots of people log in like authors, writers, or contributors, etc. and the site constantly keeps getting updated. Then you’ll need Enable ESI Toggles ON. But, since my site is personal and small, I skip the ESI settings and move onto the ‘Object’ tab settings.

In the Object tab settings, I toggled ON the Object Cache feature which is a powerful feature to speed up your website. Next, to connect your WordPress to the Memcached server options within your hosting, in the Method setting select “Memcached”, add host value: 127.0.0.1, Port: 11211 and save changes. You’ll see the status of connection Test that appears below the ‘Object Cache’ option change to “Passed”.

Sometimes, rather than Memcached your hosting provider might allow Redis only. In this case the Status of Object Cache will show Memcached Extensions: Disabled, and Redis Extension: Enabled. In such a case you’ll have to connect Redis server with your WordPress.

Next onto the Browser Tab settings. Toggle ON the Browser Cache button, and change the Browser Cache TTL value to 1000000 seconds = 1 week 4 days 13 hours 46 minutes 40 seconds. Save changes and move onto the Advanced tab settings.

In the ‘Advanced’ tab setting, the only option that you need to Toggle On is the Instant Click option. This will generate a warning saying that enabling this generates extra requests to the server. Don’t worry as long as your server is handling all the requests made, ignore this. Otherwise disable it, and move on to the CDN setting from the left WordPress menu.

Previously, at the start of configuration we enabled the QUIC.cloud CDN so it should already be toggled ON here. The rest of the things in the ‘CDN Settings’ tab are pretty good set by default and you won’t be needing any changes there.

So, we move onto the next tab which is ‘QUIC.cloud CDN Setup’. Now the settings here are applied when you want the entire traffic of your website rerouted through QUIC.cloud which is usually required when your website gets users from all around the world.

By rerouting thrugh QUIC.cloud your website will basically use the CDN which delivers your site content from the nearest server somewhere in the world. So, in case your audience is not everywhere around the globe, you can skip setting this up as I’d be doing here.

The last tab on the CDN settings: “Manage” does not requires any changes again so we skip that and move onto the ‘Image Optimization’ setting from left menu on WordPress.

In the Image Optimization setting we go directly to the ‘Image Optimization Settngs’ tab skipping the first ‘Image Optimization Summary’ tab. In the Imag Optimization Settings tab, Toggle ON the Auto Request Cron. The Auto Pull Cron and Optimize Original Images would be Toggled ON by default which is good.

Next the Remove Original Backups setting should be Toggled OFF. This is crucial because in the future if you want to uninstall LightSpeed Plugin for some reason, you’re going to need to have the original images on hand. Toggling Remove Original Backups to ON setting will remove the original images which could make your site lose useful data.

As for the ‘Optimize Losslessly’ option, if you are a photographer and your website showcases your photograph portfolio, you are going to need to keep this option Toggled ON. That way lossless compression helps keep quality a bit better and the file size would be larger. Normally, users keep this setting OFF.

The ‘Preserve EXIF/XMP data’ is Toggled ON by default, but you need to turn this OFF. This will save just a little bit of size on your images.

The ‘Image WebP Replacement’ if turned OFF by default, and you’ll need to toggle this ON. This helps because WebP is way faster than jpegs and pngs. ‘WebP Attribute To Replace’ settings does not require any changings and so we skip it and move on to ‘WebP For Extra srcset’ which is set to OFF by default. You’ll beneeding to turn it ON.

The last setting ‘WordPress Image Quality Control’ can be altered if you feel not satisfied or happy with the current image compression quality settings. By default the value is set to 82, any value below 100 is fine, you can adjust accordingly. Save the changes and then we head over to the skipped tab: ‘Image Optimization Summary’.

In the ‘Image Optimization Summary’ tab all you need to do is press the ‘Send Optimization Request’ button. By pressing this button, all your images would be sent out to the QUIC.cloud and will be optimized. Max of 200 images can be sent at once for optimization request.

Next move onto the ‘Page Optimization’. Here, Toggle ON the CSS minify, CSS Combine, Generate UCSS, and UCSS Inline. Note that should you fine the front-end of your website misbehaving, you can always turn off the CSS Combine functionality. As was the case I faced: My Menu was not appearing on the home screen so I turned CSS combine option OFF which resolved the issue.

‘CSS Combine External and Inline’ as well as the ‘Load CSS Asynchronously’, ‘CCSS per URL’, and ‘Inline CSS synch Lib’ all need to be toggled ON. The ‘Font Display Optimization’ should be set to ‘Swap’ rather than Default. Save changes made and move onto the next tab which is ‘JS Settings’.

In the JS Settings tab, toggle all options (JS Minify, JS Combine, JS Combine External and Inline) to ON. Set ‘Load JS Deferred’ to Deferred. Save changes and move onto HTML Settings.

In the HTML settings, you’ll need to turn ON all the following: HTML Minify, DNS Prefetch Control, Remove Query Strings, Load Google Fonts Asynchronously, Remove Google Fonts (if you are not using any Google fonts), Remove WordPress Emoji, and Remove Noscript Tags. Save changes and move onto ‘Media Settings’ tab.

In the Media Settings tab, first off turn ON the Lazy Load Images. You’ll also need the Responsive placeholder toggled ON. This helps in reducing the layout shuffling and that’s how it stabilizes (improves) your CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) score.

Next you could toggle ON the (Low Quality Image Placeholder) LQIP Cloud Generator which basically is helps generate low quality responsive image previews when the image is yet being loaded. You can prefer to keep this OFF if you do not want the image to be low quality. I prefer keeping this ON with LQIP value 4 and the ‘Generate LQIP in Background’ toggled ON.

If you are using iframes on your site you can toggle ON the ‘Lazy Load iframes’ option. Most people don’t use iframes so, they can keep this toggled OFF. The last option ‘Add Missing Sizes’ will also be set to toggled ON as it helps save a lot of layout shifts thus, improving your CLS. Save Changes and move onto the View Port Images ‘VPI’ tab settings.

In the VPI settings, turn ON the ‘Viewport Images’ option. What this will do is that when your page loads, everything above the fold will not be lazy loaded whereas everything under the fold will be lazy loaded. This ultimately helps in improving your Core Web Vitals scores and also the UX. Similarly, you’ll need to set Viewport Images Cron to ON settings. Save the changes made and move onto the next tab ‘Media Excludes’.

In the ‘Media Excludes’ tab, you basically filter out the images on your website that you do not want to be lazy loaded e.g. your site’s logo. To do this go to your WordPress media and select the logo image, copy its destination URL. Come back to the ‘Media Excludes’ tab option in the Page Optimization setting of the LiteSpeed Cache Plugin.

Paste the copied URL of your logo media file into the ‘Lazy Load Image Excludes’. Press the save changes button and your logo image will never be lazy loaded on the website. The excluding option in a similar way can also be applied to the CSS classes. You can adjust according to your needs now that you know how it works.

Next, we move onto the ‘Localization’ tab. The gravatars feature comes in handy when lot of people go to your website and use gravatars. In such a case you’ll need to toggle ON the Gravatar Cache option so that the images of the grafters get cached. Also toggle ON the ‘Gravatar Cache Cron’. The Gravatar Cache TTL is by default set to 1 week which equals 604800 seconds which is just great.

Last but not least, the ‘Localize Resources’ option in the localization tab should also be set to ON so that it localizes the external resources from google or Facebook (if you are using them) within the LightSpeed. That way, it’ll always serve from your own website and this could be really useful when testing out your site on GTmetrics or Google PageSpeed Insights. Save the changes made and then move onto the Tuning tab.

In the Tuning tab you can exclude some JavaScript guest mode URL excludes if you want. In the Role Excludes select the administrator to exclude yourself from caching and all optimization. This is useful when you are creating pages and want to view them. You can also explore your website as a guest with full speed by opening up your website in a new private browsing window. Save the changes and we skip the CSS Tuning tab settings as we do not want to add any excludes for now.

Next, we move onto the ‘Database’ settings of LiteSpeed Cache Plugin from the left WordPress menu. Here you can optimize your database. Be careful though, it is a bit tricky here i.e. say for example you delete all your post revisions, there won’t be no way back to go to the page and restore a revision.

So, if you often restore revisions, I recommend NEVER clearing the post revisions. Some websites have a lot of spam comments, trash, and also a lot of transients coming in. All these you can clear without hesitation because spam comments and trash don’t matter, whereas transients are the settings from other plugins which have been removed from your website. Clearing your site database of this unnecessary load will make it lighter. Remember that a clean database is a fast database.

Moving on to the ‘DB Optimization Settings’ tab, you can actually set the frequency of Revisions Max Number. The frequency number ‘n’ you enter here means that LiteSpeed Cache will hold record of only the last ‘n’ number of revisions. You can also limit this to the number of days you require the record of revisions maintained. I go with setting the frequency number 5 for last revisions record keeping.

Next the ‘Crawler’ setting of the LightSpeed Cache plugin does not require any changes made so we move onto the ‘Toolbox’ settings and head straight to the ‘Heartbeat’ tab. Over there, toggle ON the Frontend Heartbeat Control.

This is important because if you can control the heartbeat of your website and set it to 60 seconds, it will definitely impact your server resources in a positive way.

Also, toggle ON the Backend Heartbeat Control and the Editor Heartbeat. Change the value of Editor Heartbeat TTL from 15 seconds to 30 seconds. Save the changes made.

And that’s it you have got your LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress Plugin configured!

Head back to Google PageSpeed Insights and recheck your site score. It must have improved significantly!

Core Web Vitals: Improve you Page Score and UX with LiteSpeed Cache

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Building Trust through Ethical AI in SEO Content Creation

Introduction

Have you been writing your SEO web content with a help from AI bots?

Well, I believe everyone does these days, but are you sure you are not completely relying on AI bots to do the entire content writing tasks for the web?

The thing is that the content generated by AI is not guaranteed to be 100% correct and so, it is not ensured if AI-driven practices align with a responsible and transparent strategy of content creation. This poses a threat to your online presence and growth if you are relying completely on AI without paying any heed to its ethical implications.

What’s important to understand is that the use of AI in SEO content creation and content marketing should not be viewed as a step to replace humans. It rather should be adopted to make work easier and better for humans because AI helps teams simultaneously handle bulky data, identify patterns, and do repetitive tasks quickly and accurately, not to mention its capability of finding trends and improving content quality. Better still, the interaction of humans needs to be involved in the process of AI in SEO content creation because AI can not outclass human intelligence whatsoever.

With the disruptive use of AI in SEO content creation and content strategy implementation, ethical risks have come into view like the creation of biased content, or poor quality content which can mislead readers. This caters to the need for gearing in transparency in the use of AI for SEO Content Creation along with human interaction.

Before we dive into what transparency means in the use of AI and how it matters let’s first consider understanding what exactly Ethical AI is.

What exactly is Ethical AI?

Ethical AI, also termed Ethical Artificial Intelligence, refers to the development and deployment of AI technologies in a manner that aligns with ethical principles, values, and standards. It encompasses the responsible design, creation, and use of AI systems to ensure they respect human rights, dignity, diversity, privacy, and societal well-being.

Ethical AI involves considering the potential impacts of AI applications on individuals, communities, and the environment while striving to minimize biases, discrimination, and unintended consequences. It emphasizes transparency, accountability, fairness, and inclusivity throughout the AI lifecycle, from data collection and model training to deployment and monitoring.

Ultimately, Ethical AI aims to foster trust, and confidence in AI technologies, promoting their beneficial use for the betterment of society while mitigating potential risks and harms.

In terms of SEO content creation, where marketers deploy AI tools to attract wider audiences and find better business solutions, ethical AI refers to the ethical concerns associated with AI content generation like bias and discrimination, privacy and data protection, as well as accountability and transparency. There is a significant quantity of complexity involved in deriving the ethical implications of using AI in the content creation process. Let us navigate a slight overview of AI in content creation.

AI in Content Creation: An Overview

Deployment of AI tools in the generation or assistance in the generation of online digital content which may be blog posts, articles, videos, audio, or images is what’s referred to as AI in content creation. An overview of AI in content creation would include the following key points:

A growing trend with the potential to multiply efficiency and productivity for a diverse number of industries
Not operating on a single algorithm, rather is operational on different types of AI algorithms that are geared with advanced tech modules like Natural Language Processing, Image and Video Recognition, and Video Transcription.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) proves invaluable in crafting written material sourced from structured or unstructured data. By parsing through extensive datasets, it adeptly crafts summaries, articles, or reports that closely resemble human language.
The recognition of images and videos serves to classify and label visual content, aiding in the selection of suitable graphics or images for marketing collateral.
Utilizing audio transcription, speech-to-text technology converts audio content into written text, facilitating the creation of transcripts, captions, or subtitles.
Employing AI in content creation extends to optimizing content through the analysis of user engagement metrics, search engine rankings, and interactions across social media platforms.

To put it together, AI in Content Creation has the potential to wholly revolutionize the practices of content generation, the way content is distributed as well as how it is consumed.

However, given the ethical risks associated with the use of AI and of course taking into consideration the fact that with great power comes responsibility, contemplating on the ethical implications of AI in content creation is crucial to ensure that biases are not prolonged and that the user privacy is protected.

Ethical Considerations of AI in Content Creation

1) Bias and Discrimination

Bias and discrimination present significant ethical dilemmas in AI content creation, stemming from algorithms trained on biased datasets, resulting in inaccurate or unfair outcomes. Here’s a detailed look:

Bias arises when algorithms exhibit favoritism towards specific groups, such as race or gender.
Discrimination occurs when biased outcomes lead to unfavorable treatment of particular groups. For instance, if an AI model lacks diversity in its training data, it may generate biased content that perpetuates stereotypes or overlooks certain demographics, potentially leading to discriminatory content.
Discrimination can also manifest in content delivery or targeting, where different demographic groups receive distinct ads, raising concerns of discrimination.
Marketers must remain vigilant to avoid biased datasets, ensuring the AI algorithm produces impartial content.
Diversifying datasets to encompass a wide range of people and cultures is essential to mitigate bias and discrimination.
Regular monitoring and evaluation of the algorithm are crucial to identifying and addressing biases promptly.

In summary, addressing bias and discrimination in AI content creation is imperative to prevent adverse effects on marginalized groups. Marketers must proactively mitigate these issues to ensure the production of fair and unbiased content. Also, with modern-day search engines analyzing user intent to generate SERPs, ignoring the underlying implication of using AI in content creation like bias and discrimination can badly affect your SEO.

2) User Privacy and Data Protection

Privacy and data protection stand as pivotal ethical considerations in the realm of AI content creation. With AI algorithms sifting through extensive data pools, there looms a risk of gathering and utilizing personal information without the prior consent of users. This not only breaches their privacy rights but also erodes trust in both the technology and the company utilizing it.

To mitigate this concern, companies must ensure that their AI applications align with pertinent privacy and data protection regulations. They should also uphold transparency regarding data collection processes, and usage purposes, and offer users the option to opt out if they wish to abstain from data utilization.

Another aspect of safeguarding user privacy involves integrating privacy by design principles during the development of AI algorithms. This entails embedding privacy and data protection mechanisms into the system’s design, prioritizing them as integral components rather than secondary considerations.

In essence, ethical AI content creation necessitates companies to prioritize privacy and data protection through regulatory compliance, transparency, and the adoption of privacy by design principles. Such measures will foster user trust and ensure that the technology benefits all while minimizing potential harms.

3) Accountability and Transparency

In AI content creation, accountability and transparency mean that marketers and AI developers should clearly explain how their algorithms work and take responsibility for the results they produce. This involves being able to show how the AI made its decisions and accepting any negative effects it might have on people or society.

These principles are vital for ethical AI because they build trust and prevent harm. AI algorithms can create biased or unfair content, but without transparency, it’s hard to spot and fix these issues.

To ensure accountability and transparency, marketers and developers must regularly test and evaluate their algorithms and listen to feedback from users. They should also be open about how they collect and use data, giving people control over their data and the content they see.

Ultimately, being accountable and transparent about AI in content creation means making ethical choices and prioritizing the well-being of individuals and society.

The Importance of Addressing Ethical Concerns

Marketers must prioritize addressing ethical concerns related to AI in content creation. While AI can automatically generate content, it’s crucial to guarantee that the produced content is free from discrimination, respects privacy, and maintains transparency. Addressing these concerns is essential for companies to uphold a positive image and reputation. Neglecting ethical considerations can lead to legal troubles and negative public perception.

It’s crucial to recognize that the impartiality of AI is contingent on the data it’s trained on. Hence, diversifying input data is imperative to prevent AI from perpetuating existing biases. Regularly monitoring and assessing AI algorithms can ensure their ethical and transparent functioning. Engaging in ethical decision-making is also essential to avoid inadvertently causing harm through content creation. Ultimately, by prioritizing ethical AI content creation, marketers can foster a more trustworthy and equitable environment for both customers and stakeholders.

How Transparency Matters when it comes to the use of Ethical AI in SEO?

In the use of Ethical AI Transparency Matters

Public trust, disclosure, and transparency are necessary governing ethics for the use of AI technologies in various industries.

What transparency actually refers to in the use of AI for content creation is the clarity and openness of the artificial intelligence-geared writing tools in terms of their functioning, algorithms, and data sources. Content creators must understand how AI systems work, how they get to the decisions they do, and how those decisions impact the quality of content they generate.

AI tools that lack transparency are susceptible to generating content that could misguide readers with inaccurate content generation, or kindle bias and discrimination amongst group of people. Contrary to it, ensuring the understanding of transparency in AI algorithms means that the users who use AI tools for content creation educate themselves about the underlying processes, procedures, and decision-making criteria of AI tools used. This helps content creators better understand how AI tools generate their content giving them a clear opportunity to assess, edit, and discard parts of content that are likely to kindle potential bias or provoke other ethical concerns. That’s the very reason why AI tools should always be used as a complement in the creation of digital content and not as a complete replacement to humans crafting pieces of content.

Simply put, transparency enables accountability and allows for the inspection of potential discriminatory outcomes. This clearly states the need for transparency and why it matters in building trust when using Ethical AI for SEO Content Creation.

Now that we’ve understood what transparency means and how it matters in Ethical AI for SEO Content Creation, further down the article, let us understand and learn:

1. How unethical use of AI for content creation impacts your online presence and deteriorates your brand image
2. How to leverage AI writing tools responsibly and ethically

Not Using Ethical AI in SEO Content Creation: How it affects your Online Presence

Unethical use of AI tools in SEO content creation can lead to the damage of original author’s or brand’s reputation which might ultimately lead to potential legal consequences.

If you are a brand, and you largely depend on AI tools for content creation without countering the underlying unethical implications associated with them, you might lose potential customers and important leads when the content you use for your brand marketing is AI-generated, and not human-checked for probable reliability and accuracy, as well as bias and discrimination. Here’s how the unethical use of AI for SEO content creation can hurt your online presence:

- Content generated might be unreliable or inaccurate which can convey wrong information to readers, dangling their trust in your brand.

Explanation: Reliability and Accuracy are key factors in evaluating AI writing tools. Reliability involves the consistency and trustworthiness of the content produced, ensuring it meets desired standards. Accuracy focuses on the correctness and precision of the information generated, crucial for avoiding errors or misinformation. While these tools rely on algorithms and machine learning, ensuring reliability and accuracy can be challenging due to potential biases and limitations in recognizing nuances or context. Developers must continuously enhance algorithms and models to improve reliability and accuracy, while users should independently verify the content produced.

- Content generated might be acquired directly from an existing source and so fails to pass the Plagiarism check by search engines which depreciates your content ranking on SERPs.

Explanation: Transparency and accountability are essential to address concerns of plagiarism and copyright infringement. Transparency involves openness about how these tools function and the data sources they use, vital for understanding their decision-making process. Lack of transparency can lead to unintended plagiarism or copyright issues.

- AI-generated content might be skewed in favor of one group or another which could again make you lose part of your audience

Explanation: Addressing bias is critical to ensure fairness and inclusiveness in the content generated. AI systems can unintentionally perpetuate stereotypes or discriminate against certain groups, highlighting the need for diversifying training data and improving bias detection capabilities.

- AI tools used for content creation pose data breach and privacy risks which can affect your relationship with your audience

Explanation: Data privacy and security are ethical concerns related to the protection of personal information used in AI writing tools. Developers must ensure secure storage and handling of user data, transparently informing users about data practices, and implementing robust security measures to prevent unauthorized access or breaches. Users should also be cautious about sharing sensitive information and choose tools that prioritize data privacy and security.

Making use of AI Writing Tools Responsibly

Above mentioned points clearly state that Ethical use of AI along with a human touch are necessary if AI is to be used in SEO content creation process. Responsible use of AI generated content is the top priority when making use of AI tools. Below are some of the steps that users can implement to leverage the use of AI for SEO content creation.

1) Implementing proper attribution and citation with AI writing tools

This includes acknowledging and providing credit to the original creators or sources of information. Complete acknowledgment includes but is not necessarily limited to:

1. Giving recognition and credit to honor the work of others that has helped in adding credibility to your content.
2. Including citations to help readers verify information and access original material whenever necessary.
3. Circumventing plagiarism and respecting intellectual property rights to avoid unnecessary and unethical act of representing others’ work as your own without appropriate attribution.
4. Confirming sources and checking for credibility of all the AI-generated content information before citing any source in the content
5. Differentiating AI-generated content from your original work content to make clear sections created by the tool and those that pertain to your own work.
6. Adhering to specific style guidelines to ensure consistency and precision

2) Checking and confirming with independent verification

Independent verification here refers to cross-checking for the accuracy and validity of AI-generated content and not solely relying on their output. Other than the accuracy checks mentioned in the previous step of proper attribution and citation, independent verification involves additional steps and key points like:

1. Application of Critical Analysis and critical thinking skills to evaluate AI-generated content for logical coherence, consistency, and possible bias
2. Cross-checking the AI-generated content through cross-referencing with multiple reputable sources to validate its credibility and correctness.
3. Engaging in the subject matter experts to include the required human touch ensuring the accuracy of generated content.
4. Tapping into online content repositories to consult available official reports, research papers, or governmental sources to double-check data and statistics provided by AI in content creation
5. Learning user experience from your content by establishing a feedback loop mechanism where users are allowed to report inaccuracies and false information so as to make better the performance of AI tools
6. Focusing on user responsibility by encouraging them to remain vigilant and take responsibility for independently verifying the information before relying on it.
7. Identifying and countering potential errors by analyzing the AI-generated content for any errors, logical fallacies, or inconsistencies that might have slipped through
8. Making use of fact-checking platforms or reputable websites that specialize in verifying claims and information

Independent verification is crucial as it acts as a safety measure against misinformation or inaccuracies that arise due to the limitations and bias in AI content writing tools.

Conclusion

Responsible use of AI-generated content entails the ethical obligation of the users of technology to employ AI writing tools judiciously and in accordance with legal and ethical standards. This involves acknowledging the limitations of AI technology and taking measures to address potential risks.

One key aspect is ensuring proper attribution and citation of AI-generated content, giving credit to the AI tool and preventing plagiarism. Independent verification is also crucial; users should fact-check AI-generated content to avoid disseminating inaccurate information. Additionally, caution is advised when relying solely on AI-generated content for critical purposes like legal or medical advice, as human expertise is essential for accuracy and context.

In summary, responsible use of AI-generated content necessitates conscientious user behaviour, including critical evaluation of outputs, adherence to ethical standards, and supplementing AI tool outputs with human judgment to uphold content quality and integrity. AI should be used as a complement in the practices of SEO content creation rather than a replacement to human beings.

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Introduction

What exactly is Ethical AI?

AI in Content Creation: An Overview

Ethical Considerations of AI in Content Creation

1) Bias and Discrimination

2) User Privacy and Data Protection

3) Accountability and Transparency

The Importance of Addressing Ethical Concerns

How Transparency Matters when it comes to the use of Ethical AI in SEO?

Not Using Ethical AI in SEO Content Creation: How it affects your Online Presence

Making use of AI Writing Tools Responsibly

1) Implementing proper attribution and citation with AI writing tools

2) Checking and confirming with independent verification

Conclusion

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