ImagesMagUK_July_2021

www.images-magazine.com JULY 2021 images 23 BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Fixing issues highlighted in the report Starting with the poor URLs in the Core Web Vitals report, website owners should try to make changes that will improve page speed and overall user experience. This might mean reducing the size of the images used on the site, limiting the number of page resources, or using Accelerated Mobile Pages to ensure a top-notch user experience on mobile devices. Removing unnecessary third-party scripts and setting up lazy loading can also improve your Core Web Vitals. Page experience is one of the main factors that Google’s algorithm uses to determine where a website should rank in the search results, so getting this right should help you to achieve higher rankings. In addition, a good user experience is likely to help you attract and retain new clients – after all, happy users usually translate into happy customers! For that reason, it’s important to make use of the data provided in the Core Web Vitals report and keep your website fast and functional. C ore Web Vitals are a group of metrics that Google uses to assess the kind of user experience a web page offers. The Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console gathers anonymous data from website visitors then ranks the URLs based on a number of different factors. Generally speaking, pages that load quickly provide a better user experience than pages that load slowly, so Google looks at how quickly different parts of a website respond to user interaction and highlight areas for improvement. Core Web Vitals make up a large percentage of your overall page experience score, so it’s important to check this report regularly and make improvements where they’re needed. Understanding the Core Web Vitals report This report assesses three different things: Largest Contentful Paint The time from when a user requests the URL and the moment the largest content element (usually an image or video) renders in the viewport. First Input Delay The time from when a user interacts with a page (by clicking a link or button) and the moment the browser responds to that interaction. Cumulative Layout Shift An assessment of visual stability based on the cumulative number of layout shifts on a page. Once all of these elements have been tested, URLs are ranked as ‘good’ (green), ‘needs improvement’ (yellow) or ‘poor’ (red). By looking at the mobile and desktop graphs in the Core Web Vitals report, a website owner can get a snapshot of their website’s performance on different devices over time. CoreWebVitals:What are they and why are they important? Lauren Debnam is from ETrader, one of the industry’s leading suppliers of websites to garment decorators across the UK. www.etraderwebsites.co.uk H ave you ever been asked by a small business owner to follow their Facebook page and then they will follow you back, therefore giving everyone hundreds of likes? It is the adult version of those chain emails you had to send around at school in case you gave yourself bad luck! They are, I’m afraid, utterly pointless. Why do you want a random bunch of strangers following you anyway? They won’t become customers, so there is literally no point in them being part of your audience. Hundreds of people follow and unfollow our social channels everyday. It just happens that the ratio of follows to unfollows is positive for popular creators. People are constantly deciding what gets their attention and what they want to ignore, which means that our following is a refined audience that are actively engaged. We did, however, actually ‘go viral’ last month. We used the Reels feature to make a video on Instagram. Instagram will always favour you making videos in the app (and no re-sampling old footage), and is currently promoting these videos to compete with TikTok, so when our video had over 6 million views, that had a ripple effect. We found we gained about 6,000 followers in a week, and the customer whose shirt was featured in the video sold out and instantly asked for a reprint. The surge then dropped off suddenly as the newest video was given the spotlight, and so we are back to our usual growth rate. Here are a couple of things to think about when trying to have an impact. Create content someone would want Going viral and why likes are not as important as you think to save. Saved content performs really well as the platforms see it has value for the audience. We do this by giving information or sharing something we have learned. Try to create and edit unique videos inside the app you are using. That will also mean trying to integrate the music and sounds the platforms are promoting at the time. And never ask for follows or likes.... it’s a bit sad. Asking people to subscribe to YouTube, however, is slightly different and socially accepted because followers get notifications of new content. Chessie Rosier-Parker is director and studio manager of Squeegee & Ink, a screen printing and embroidery studio that also provides pre-exposed screens and film to printers along with tutorial videos and resources. www.squeegeeandink.co.uk/ learn-to-screen-print