User Experience is one of the important ranking signals in 2021. Google and Bing have made this aspect clear for the relevancy of search engine results.
Web Vitals are core metrics that quantify the web experience of your site and provide opportunities to improve.
Also Read – GeneratePress Review – Improve Load Time by 385%
Google has made the initiative to form quality signals in the form of Core Web Vitals. It’s a subset of the Web Vitals that apply to all web pages.
Bloggers do not have to be technical gurus to understand these user performance metrics.
Also Read – Performance Test with WP Rocket and Autoptimize Together – Results
Core Web Vitals – Overview
Each of the core web vitals represents a particular facet of user experience. The three main core web vitals measured by lab and field tools are LCP (largest contentful paint), FID, and CLS(cumulative layout shift).
Also Read – We Tested Fast Velocity Minify (FVM) Plugin for Core Web Vitals and Speed Performance – 3 Testing Tools
Lighthouse and ChromeDevTools use TBT (total blocking time) instead of FID in the lab environment.
Also Read – How Autoptimize and Critical CSS Fare in Page Speed and Core Web Vitals
DreamPress by DreamHost
DreamPress is one of the WordPress-managed hosting plans provided by DreamHost. It is a special cloud-based service with a higher configuration of server, memory, and caching. The built-in caching provides extreme speed.
Also Read – Best WordPress Cache Plugin – WP Rocket – Our Results
Additional tools like email, staging, and backups make DreamPress a unique WordPress hosting plan. DreamHost, the hosting service provider, also gives 24×7 premium tech support and free wordpress migration for DreamPress plans.
DreamPress Plans
There are 3 types of DreamPress plans – 1. DreamPress 2. Plus 3. Pro. Each plan has its unique advantage.
The basic plan is sufficient for 100k monthly visitors. The Plus plan for 300k monthly visitors and the Pro plan for 1Million+ visitors. In addition, storage and CDN are provided in higher-end plans.
Also Read – Rocket.net Review – Best Plans and Pricing – Common Features
Core Web Vitals – Importance
The user experience metrics of LCP, TBT, and CLS are mainly dependent on the theme layout, design, theme configuration, JS elements, render-blocking resources, largest block size above the fold, and many others.
In this case study, we will see how core web vitals on DreamPress plan score with GeneratePress theme.
To get more details about this web hosting, read my DreamHost review here.
Test Scenario with DreamPress Plan
We have already done a case study of the effect of the DreamPress plan on TTFB (time to the first byte) times. The same website consisting of many active plugins, themes, and other resources are used. The web page is also the same.
Core Web Vitals and DreamPress – Using WebPageTest
The following are the results for LCP, TBT, and CLS.
As we can see above, LCP and CLS were in green limits. It indicates that the DreamPress user experience is good enough, and the layout, theme configuration is also good.
When there are no large paint objects, LCP would be good. On the same side, if there are not too many movable elements, CLS is green.
But due to too many AdSense ads above the fold, the TBT value was in red.
We can also use WP Rocket to defer JS code and load lately. It may improve the total web vitals.
DreamPress and Core Web Vitals – Using GTMetrix Test
The core web vitals results are as below.
As we can see above, LCP and TBT are in red. The total page size is around 2.72MB. Video and JS constitute about 2.0MB. The number of page requests is 367. Others, JS, Img, were the leading causes for this many requests.
Conclusion
Though the host does not play many roles in user experience, we can see that the main web vitals are all good with DreamPress and GeneratePress configuration. For TBT, we either need to optimize the existing website code or remove the ad JS elements. – WebPageTest
As this site also loads video ads, the loading is a never-ending one. It is one of the primary causes of high loading time. Also, the Adsense Ads and video ads contribute to the high LCP and TBT. Since the height element is restricted in the Ad Inserter Pro plugin, CLS is low – GTMetrix Test.