The marketing for Core Web Vitals (CWV) has been a massive success. I guess that’s what happens when the world’s dominant search engine tells people that something’s going to be an SEO factor. Ya know what language can play a huge role in those CWV scores? I’ll wait five minutes for you to think of it. Just kidding, it’s CSS.
Katie Hempenius and Una Kravets:
The way you write your styles and build layouts can have a major impact on Core Web Vitals. This is particularly true for Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
For example…
- Absolutely positioning things takes them out of flow and prevents layout shifting (but please don’t read that as we should absolute position everything).
- Don’t load images you don’t have to (e.g. use a CSS gradient instead), which lends a bit of credibility to this.
- Perfect font fallbacks definitely help layout shifting.
There are a bunch more practical ideas in the article and they’re all good ideas (because good performance is good for lots of reasons), even if the SEO angle isn’t compelling to you.
Hmm, thanks Chris, will be looking at this and make quick updates on my websites out there to make them comply.
Thanks Chris always helpful. But I sometimes wonder why are we rebranding each wheel we reinvent has anybody else ever feel that way? CSS SEO positioning proper text all of these things are like part of the standards movement ideology from back in the day it’s just another rebrands LOL you got that one right
Yes!! CSS can absolutely make a big impact.
We’ve had a lot of 3rd party sites we’ve optimized where optimizing their font stack was a major issue we needed to address to fix CLS.
Also, the use of max/min-height/width are great for keeping things responsive but giving browsers just enough info they need to reserve space for elements to avoid things shifting.