cumulative layout speed hurting rankings

[Arturo99]

I have a non wordpress site where cumulative layout speed is red flagged at 46%
its on an ASP platform
How can i get fix this?

Is it a matter of hacking in some tags?
i tried adding <link rel=preload>
But had no effect at all

thanks
arthur

[not2easy]

There are a few places to look for slow loading causes.

<link rel=preload>

is not a valid meta tag, so it can't do what you want it to do.

Step 1 should be to rule out any technical issues.

Browsers are very forgiving and will take their sweet time to work around errors, doing their best to follow the instructions they find on the page. This is why I always suggest to visit the validators at W3C because they set the standards and can provide you with a starting point by showing any errors or possible code problems. There is a Validator for HTML and one for CSS that can provide you with a free report just by pasting your URL into the tool and selecting the type of report you want to get. It is free.

HTML Validator: [validator.w3.org...]
CSS Validator: [jigsaw.w3.org...]

Step 2 should be to examine your images. The number one thing that slows loading is images which have not been optimized. If the images are larger than they need to be, that can have people giving up on seeing the page as it loads and just hit their back button. Using a 2000 x 1850 image to show a thumbnail is a waste of your resources and an offense against the mobile visitor. They need to download all those extra Kb (or Mb) before their browser can show the image.

When you determine the cause of the slow loading, then we can address remedies here. ;)

[lucy24]

There exist plenty of speed-testing sites that will give you details about which page elements are taking especially long to load up. Look especially at content that lives somewhere else, such as third-party fonts, and also for significant differences between “first page” and “second page”. The latter comes into play when it takes exceptionally long to do a DNS lookup, either for your own site or third parties.

Obligatory editorial comment:

cumulative layout speed hurting rankings

It is also possible, ahem, cough-cough, that slow rendering speed is hurting the user experience for human visitors.

[riccarbi]

There is something wrong in how Core Vitals currently measures CLT (Cumulative Layout Shift, not Speed). I guess, GCWV is still too young a tool and needs definitely to be updated and fixed in order to produce reliable ranking /user experience signals. My websites failed a fix request for First Contentful Paint being over 2.5 secs on desktop while the highest FCP reported by CV lab ranges between 0.9 and 1.2 seconds for all pages... Don't get Core Web Vitals too seriously, for the time being.

[Webweeb]

Right now its not hurting anything. I fixed everything as soon as the tool was released, everything is green now and my rankings have fallen if anything.

Also the tool is accurate, but it takes about 1 to 1.5 months to collect data and update data. Also it uses user data collected from browsers.
So real life data instead of testing tool data.

[not2easy]

Back to the original question:

I have a non wordpress site where cumulative layout speed is red flagged at 46%
its on an ASP platform

Have you made sure that the resources needed to process the layout, the css files and .js files have not been blocked by robots.txt?

[tangor]

Do check the number of third party includes on the page.

One way to test the page itself is to comment out all of that and run some tests to see if the page actually loads in a speedy manner. Address any issues discovered, then add in each third party item to see which is the slowpoke.

MEANWHILE, clear your browser cache each time you test to make sure your browser is not part of the reporting!

[Arturo99]

lucy24 I am running lighthouse 6 but i cant see 1st and 2nd pages calling up DNS from 3rd parties.

What i see is: (I am not sure if blocking these might affect the functioning of the actual page)

preload keyw requests to local css ................................................5,250 ms
jsload/magnific.css......................................................................5,200 ms


elimniate render blocking resources;
/css?family=Open+Sans:400,400i,700,800(fonts.googleapis.com)........770 ms
/scripts/core_webwiz.js?v=230…(www.domain.com)........................7,600 ms

Minimize main-thread work..................................................................3.4 sec
script evaluation................................................................................1.37 sec