WordPress 6.3, which is due to be released next month, will help websites meet the Core Web Vital metric Largest Contentful Paint, potentially meaning better SEO performance.
The new version of WordPress will help websites to improve their Core Web Vitals scores, which has been a ranking factor for Google since July 2021. Core Web Vitals, which is related to page speed, can help to improve your website’s sales as users will be getting a better experience.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how long it takes the largest element on a page – usually an image or a text block – to load. This is used by Google to reveal how a user perceives the loading time of the website.
How is WordPress 6.3 going to improve LCP?
WordPress will be introducing adding Fetch Priority to webpage elements such as images, CSS and JavaScript. This will help to tell browsers what needs to be loaded to generate the content for the website visitor.
Content that is lower down than the viewpoint (which is the top part of the website users see before they scroll down the page) will be loaded with a lower priority, as it won’t be seen until the user scrolls down the page.
Another feature being improved is “lazy loading” of images and iFrames within the content, which tells browsers not to load the content until it is within view of the website visitor. With the new update, WordPress will be able to detect all this automatically and will load only the most critical resources, which will help with the LCP metrics for your website.
If you’re looking to increase sales and leads for your business through your website and need help to do this, get in touch with our friendly team at Engage Web.
- Key takeaways from Google’s latest search reviews update - November 10, 2023
- Mobile-first indexing: what is it, and why has it taken so long? - November 3, 2023
- Google updates structured data understanding - October 31, 2023
