We all know that website speed is important for search engine optimization (SEO) and its modern-day cousin, generative engine optimization (GEO). It’s also common knowledge that the better your SEO and GEO, the better the results you’ll see from your website. More visitors, happier users, and higher returns on your investment.
Measures like core web vitals (CWV) are a crucial way to benchmark your website speed, see where things can improve, and understand how Google and other engines see your website.
If core web vitals are new to you, start with the introduction on Google’s web.dev site. As you’ll see, there are three different CWVs:
- Largest content paintful (LCP) measures how fast the heaviest element on your page loads.
- Interaction to next paint (INP) is about latency. When a visitor to your site interacts with the page, how long do you take to respond?
- CLS (cumulative layout shift) looks at stability. Do parts of your page jump around as everything loads?
LCP and INP in particular are about speed and responsiveness. The faster PHP runs, and the more optimized your code is, the better your scores will be.
Developers are typically well attuned to all of this. Optimizing image sizes and avoiding bloated plugins or themes, for example, are common routines for devs around the world. Get these things right, and you ought to see good core web vital scores.
Hardware is an important SEO factor
But what if you go through all that good work and your core web vitals don’t budge? You might be hosted on hardware that can’t keep up.
To put that another way: Your choice of web host directly affects your core web vitals. Therefore, your web host directly affects your SEO and GEO. Ultimately, your web host directly affects the experience you offer your site visitors, and the returns that you will make form your website.
It hasn’t always been easy to know if your host is helping or hindering your site speed. That’s why we’ve made PHP Vitals.
PHP Vitals separates out your hosting infrastructure from everything else and tells you how it performs, regardless of the code and website that you’re running on top of it. If your PHP Vitals score is average, then you have found a constraint that will apply no matter how hard you work on slimming down code and making files lighter.
Download the free WP plugin today and run your first PHP Vitals benchmark. You just might discover another route to SEO and GEO success.