From a young age it’s ingrained in most of us that achievement is important, and that’s why from Grade 1 onwards it’s a fairly big deal when we receive our report card from school. Getting good grades can fast-track you towards success, but of course there are other ways of getting there and you certainly aren’t doomed if you didn’t have good grades coming out of high school. Once you enter the working world, however, there will be scores that are more definitive. If you’re in business for yourself and leaning on a website for the success of that business then your core web vitals score is one of them and there’s a connection between it and the best hosting for faster WordPress websites in Canada.
Managed WordPress hosting makes that available for anyone who has that type of business website, and many people do based on the track record for simplicity and ease of use / construction that WordPress is known for. Better search engine optimization is always going to be the primary means of having your site come up higher in SERPs, and the business owners can also look to WordPress hosting for better SEO performance.
That’s a subject that’s been gone over at length though, and so we’ll keep the focus here on core web vitals scores. It’s not the most household term in digital marketing and website optimization so let’s get a definition before we move any further, Your site’s core web vitals score is going to be the sum of 3 parts, which are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) - A measurement of how long it takes for the largest content element on the page to load
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) - Measuring how much the page layout moves around unexpectedly as it loads. Like images or buttons shifting
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) - A measurement of how much time is needed between when a user initiates any interaction to when the next visual update is shown on the screen
Your site’s core web vitals score is going to be based on how well you do with each of these three criteria, and the truth of the matter is that most of the eCommerce sites on the web have a shortcoming with at least one of the three. In some instances to the extent that their score is lowered quite a bit because of it. PIPEDA compliance for the site is another consideration too, but what we’ll do with this week’s blog entry is discuss how going with Managed WordPress hosting can improve your site’s core web vitals score.
No Bottlenecks
The reason that managed hosting is the best hosting for faster WordPress websites Canada is because the hosting provider will be doing smart caching with the site that will - most notably - reduces Time to First Byte (TTFB), and reduce the speed at which the largest contentful elements of a page begin loading. Having your site cached regularly is a part of the added services you get when you pay more for managed web hosting, and there are other elements of the services that contribute to better functioning websites with higher core web vitals scores. You can also expect another pair of very beneficial features. The first is cache warmup, which sees to it that first-time visitors get cached versions instead of having them waiting for standard generation and needing to wait for site components to display;.
The second is smart invalidation, where cached content is displayed automatically to site visitors when you make changes. With managed hosting you can also count on your pages not having any layout shifts occurring when the page loads, and that’s something that can happen fairly easily and will take away from your site’s score. But the biggest gain you get from Managed Hosting as it relates to web core vitals is the way you won’t be experiencing any bottlenecking with your site.
This is because too often web hosting can be minimized by slow infrastructure. With managed hosting you have experts reviewing this possibility at all times and doing what it takes to prevent any sites from having a hosting bottleneck. These are the 3 most common indicators of a hosting bottleneck.
- A TTFB (Time to First Byte) in PageSpeed Insights diagnostics that is over 600ms
- The site is still slow with everything disabled and only a few plugins active
- Server response time struggling during traffic spikes
With quality managed hosting you’ll be more assured of fast server response times. Your hosing provider is also better equipped to be choosy about the themes and plugins that are installed for your site, and may remove or alter ones that are contributing to slower page load speed. Themes can become a burden on a website when they’re too heavy or when they are made up of certain page builders. A 500KB theme versus a 50KB theme creates a 10x difference before any content even loads. That’s 450KB of CSS, JavaScript, and fonts your visitors download before seeing a single word of your actual content.
Page builders like Elementor, Divi, and similar ones will inject layers of divs and inline styles and rendering is slowed because of it. Then there’s there issue of plugin overheard as it relates to WordPress hosting for better SEO performance. Plugins will loads additional scripts and stylesheets and possibly be adding anywhere up to 80KB of JavaScript even on pages without share buttons.
Advanced Optimizations
There’s more to why Managed Hosting is tops for the best hosting for faster WordPress websites Canada, and your host will also be proactive in optimizing your site following each of the regularly-scheduled reviews of all sites being hosted on a managed plan. They will work with image CDN so that images are served from servers closer to your users whenever possible. This minimizes latency and improves LCP and FCP.
The host will also be on top of video facades. What’s standard with this approach to faster loading web pages is to replace heavy video embeds with lightweight preview images. The actual video player only loads when users click to watch, and this drastically improves initial load times. Critical CSS generation is also part of the process, and with it the site is geared to prep extracts and inlines only the CSS needed for above-the-fold rendering. This does require some level of technical ability, but it’s the kind of stuff you can expect a web hosting provider to be very familiar with based on what they do.
Then there’s a small bit that individual site masters can see to on their own. Your web hosting provider likely isn’t the one writing your site content for you, and so making smarter choices about the type and length of content is one of the few things that will still be on your plate when you have managed web hosting. WordPress hosting for better SEO performance can take care of the search engine optimization end of the equation, but what you can do is keep your pages clean and be mindful of installing too many widgets and complex JavaScript-heavy elements on your pages.
They can detract from the site’s performance, and this is especially for site visitors who are on a mobile device. The standard suggestions here are to avoid stacking large blocks of content, multiple image sliders, social media widgets, or other complex widgets that have to make multiple network calls. Try to have optimized images, copy, and streamlined designs with what you’re choosing to fill the web pages with.
Right Pieces in Place
Go with a quality Canadian web hosting provider who has managed WordPress hosting like we do here at 4GoodHosting and you’re site will probably see an immediate boost in its core web vitals score. This is the sum of a built-In global content delivery network (CDN) that automatically serves your site through a content delivery network with edge caching in multiple global locations. The provider will almost always offer built-in caching too, and we talked about the importance of page caching for web core vitals scores earlier in this entry. For WordPress sites this caching is done in a way that is more receptive to the needs of WordPress-built sites.
This type of intelligent built-in caching features multiple layers of caching with rules tuned for WordPress and WooCommerce sites. Site scaling is done automatically as needed too, usually with vertical scaling up to 100 CPU cores. Last but not least managed hosting site masters will receive monthly performance reports with detailed reviews and actionable recommendations to improve Core Web Vitals and other performance, accessibility, and SEO metrics. Information about PIPEDA compliance can be made available for sites that need to be in compliance as a results of data collection done though transactions for an eCommerce website.
