Great news coming if you have a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0

Good news for website owners and developers! If you have a website with a Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) score of 0, then you’re in for a treat! The soon-to-be-released Lighthouse version 10 in Page Speed Insights will bring an increase in your Core Web Vital score.

However, if your site suffers from a CLS issue, then, I’m afraid that you’re going to see a reduction in your Core Web Vital score.

The Lighthouse update

Since 2018, Lighthouse is part of Google’s PageSpeed Insights audit tool. The current PageSpeed Insights tool is running on v9. It has been advised that sometime in February 2023, the PageSpeed Insights tool will be upgraded to v10.

What’s the change

The difference between version 9 and 10 relate to the weighting of how lighthouse scores are calculated.

Below is how each value is attributed with a weighting score:

V9

V9 puts a weighting of:

  • FCP (First Contentful Paint): 10%
  • SI (Speed Index): 10%
  • LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): 25%
  • TTI (Time to Interactive): 10%
  • TBT (Total Blocking Time): 30%
  • CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): 15%

V10

V10 puts a weighting of:

  • FCP (First Contentful Paint): 10%
  • SI (Speed Index): 10%
  • LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): 25%
  • TTI (Time to Interactive): Removed
  • TBT (Total Blocking Time): 30%
  • CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): 25%

As you can see, in V10, TTI (Time to Interactive) is being removed and the excess weighting is now being pushed to the CLS.

What does this mean

Hypothetically, if your WordPress has a CLS of 0 and it is currently has a mobile score of 84/100, the new upgrade will mean that your Core Web Vitals score will increase to approximately 89, even 90/100 based on the increased weighting attributed to the CLS.

With the right tools, it will be even easier to improve your Core Web Vital score.

Core Web Vital Optimization for WordPress

If you want to see your Core Web Vital score excel, try Staq!

Staq has a proprietary caching and optimizer tool that will optimize:

  • JS, CSS load, including defer and delay scripts
  • lazyload
  • image compression
  • image conversion to WebP
  • optimize Google fonts
  • reduce the DOM size of the HTML page

Then, you can load the HTML page in AWS CloudFront, AWS’ CDN service. That way, you’ll ensure a high performing and fast loading website when it’s hosted on Staq.

Core Web Vital optimization tutorials

If you wish to learn how to perform Core Web Vital optimization for WordPress, you’ll have to migrate your WordPress site to Staq and then you can follow these guides below to get the most out of your score:

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