Last year, Google announced that they are going to add a new ranking factor to their search algorithm: Core Web Vitals.
This aligns with Google’s dedication to user experience (UX), and ensuring that anyone using Google search will get what they want from the web pages listed on the results page.
But what does that mean to a WordPress website owner?
Should you panic that your online business is going to crumble? Or is the pandemonium about Google’s announcement an overreaction?
More importantly: Are Thrive Themes doing anything to improve Core Web Vitals?
Yes, we are. And in this post, we’ll share an official statement about what we are optimizing in our software, and why.
Read on.
More...
If you’re already familiar with the Google core web vitals announcement, click here to jump to our official statement about what we are doing.
If you aren’t, read on to get a fresh perspective on what this is all about.
What Are Core Web Vitals?
The Google algorithm uses over 200+ ranking factors to determine which websites should be shown on results pages.
Not all factors are equal, and some will have a much greater impact on SEO than others.
Across the industry, it’s widely accepted that the main factors are:
You get the idea.
Google is concerned with showing great web pages that are objectively considered to offer the right answer to a search query.
Last year, Google announced that they would be adding new ranking factors to their algorithm in May 2021 mid-June 2021 based on what they call ‘Core Web Vitals’.
[UPDATE: Google has changed their schedule and the update will start rolling out Core Web Vitals gradually from mid-June 2021 until August.]
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"We'll begin using page experience as part of our ranking systems beginning in mid-June 2021. However, page experience won't play its full role as part of those systems until the end of August."
Google, 19th April 2021.
The three Core Web Vitals Google have highlighted as part of the update are:
Google's 3 key measures of Core Web Vitals.
- 1Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How long does it take before your website visually appears on a user’s browser so they can read or consume your page content. Google prefers 2.5 seconds or less.
- 2First Input Delay (FID): A measure of interactivity. How long does it take before a visitor can click, scroll or do something on the page? Google prefers 100 milliseconds or less.
- 3Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Does your website stay still while it’s loading? Or does it shift around unexpectedly? Google prefers 0.1… which means minimal.
You can see that they want a visitor to click a search result, see your content quickly, be able to interact with it immediately, and for it to remain stable on the page.
It’s important to note that this is about how your page code loads and is rendered, just as much as it is about your loading speed.
How Will the Google Core Web Vitals Update Affect Your WordPress Site?
Remember that this announcement adds to an already very powerful algorithm looking at over 200+ ranking factors.
The top ranking factors still remain.
Improving your Core Web Vitals isn’t going to make your website magically start ranking for search terms that you haven’t written content for, haven’t optimized for, have no backlinks for, and aren’t already ranking for.
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“A good page experience doesn't override having great, relevant content. However, in cases where there are multiple pages that have similar content, page experience becomes much more important for visibility in Search.”
Google, 28th May 2020.
You still need to satisfy the rest of the algorithm before Google decides your site is worth showing for specific searches.
This Google algorithm update is most likely going to affect websites that rank very highly for competitive search terms whilst being the worst offenders of Core Web Vitals.
I’m looking at you... top ranking recipe websites loaded with a million moving adverts, jumping videos and taking 20 seconds to load.
If you are not ranking in Google yet, having a fast site won’t make a difference. The issue isn’t speed, it’s everything else the algorithm is looking for.
Brendan Tulley from WPspeedfix, who has experience optimizing over 4000 sites puts this into perspective in an interview at Diggity Marketing:
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“Let’s talk about site speed and SEO. About half of the enquiries we get at WPspeedfix are people looking for site speed optimization or speed help because they want better SEO. But if you take a 30 second look at their on-page SEO, you see that it’s horrible: they don’t have basic title tags, meta descriptions, and they don’t even have content for the things they want to rank for. Even if we got them 100 on page speed insights, it’s not going to make a difference because that is not the roadblock.”
Brendan Tulley, WPSpeedfix.
That’s not to say that Core Web Vitals don’t matter.
It does. Unanimously.
Because it is primarily about user experience.
It’s significant enough that Google, who notoriously stay quiet about their algorithm improvements, have publicly announced that they are adding it to their algorithm.
What Can You Do to Improve Your Website?
The Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule, suggests that you can get 80% of the results from 20% of the work.
It’s a good rule to live by, because it prevents you, the business owner, from tripping up on the need for perfection or fussing over decisions that yield diminishing returns.
As a website and business owner, there are thousands of things to focus on and some will grow your business faster than others.
That’s why our recommendations for website speed are still the same as they were last year:
Follow best practices in these 3 key areas related to speed, and then move on...
- 1Use a quality website hosting service: This alone can have a massive impact on your website and, therefore, Input Delay Speed. Right now, we recommend WPX.
- 2Use a caching plugin: Caching can drastically reduce website load speeds by eliminating server processing times which in turn improves Largest Contentful Paint.
- 3Compress and serve adaptive image sizes: Reducing the file size of your webpages will make them load faster, and images are often the biggest files. This will reduce the Cumulative Layout Shift.
We even wrote a blog post about it. To see how to do this in more detail, Reduce Your Load Time By 50% With These 3 Changes.
This is why, in Thrive Theme Builder, we added ‘Site Speed’ management last year- an easy way to automatically improve your website user experience in a matter of clicks.
Look for the Site Speed tab when using Thrive Theme Builder
Inside of Thrive Theme Builder’s Site Speed dashboard, you can one-click add pre-configured caching with Total Cache, WP Fastest Cache or WP Rocket.
When you enable these caching tools in Thrive Theme Builder, we take care of automatically applying the recommended settings that work nicely with our software on WordPress.
Then, you can enable Image Optimization with either Optimole or Smush inside of the Site Speed dashboard, which will ensure that images on your website are resized and compressed to save space.
The rest, you can leave to us.
"But what about AMP?"
AMP stands for ‘Accelerated Mobile Pages’. Currently our AMP feature is in a public beta, and we’re not sure if it’s worth developing it further.
A few years ago, Google stood by AMP as a necessary technology. But slowly, they’ve gone quiet about it. We get the suspicion that the shortcomings of AMP will prevent it from being the industry-wide solution that it was once promised.
And we’re not the only ones uncertain about the future of AMP. Google announced that AMP sites would no longer be a prerequisite for listing in Google’s Top Stories, and instead would be replaced by - surprise, surprise...
... Core Web Vitals.
It’s about time we look into how you can test your WordPress site “vitals”...
How to Measure Core Web Vitals: WordPress
To optimize your WordPress site, first you need to test website performance by putting together a Core Web Vitals report. Google has some handy tools to help you get this.
Both sources report on what needs to be improved with your First Input Delay, Largest Contentful Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift in great detail. With these insights you can target the pages that are affecting your load time numbers specifically.
To really improve Core Web Vitals in WordPress, you’ll need to pay attention to data from both PageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console to identify anything that could be affecting your website performance.
The combination of pre-determined on-page performance and honest reflections of your user experience will allow you to optimize accurately.
Of course, it wouldn’t be Thrive Themes if we didn’t come up with our own solution to improve your Core Web Vitals. Page builder plugins have to optimize the websites you build with our software to give you and your customers the best experience possible — it’s literally our job to make sure this works.
So…
What Are Thrive Themes Doing About Core Web Vitals in WordPress?
Now that we’ve covered the basics, put the Google announcement into perspective for your WordPress site, and have ensured you’re following best practices with hosting, caching and image optimization...
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room for Core Web Vitals:
Thrive Themes software.
We already have our best developers working on a series of code optimizations in our WordPress software centered around Core Web Vitals metrics.
A significant part of your Core Web Vitals score is how the code of your website is structured.
The plugins and themes in Thrive Suite create the code that Google sees and loads. We’re working diligently behind the scenes to analyze how we serve that code on your WordPress websites and to carefully optimize it as best we can, without any negative effects to your site-building experience or your visitor’s browsing experience.
Since Google’s announcement last year, more and more information has slowly come out about what influences LCP, FID and CLS metrics. Google even stated that Core Web Vitals is a growing and evolving project.
We've kept our eyes on these discussions and have discovered where we can improve our codebase.
This isn’t just about satisfying Google. This is about creating the best software we possibly can.
But it isn’t a simple task.
This is software engineering at its most challenging.
We have our company’s co-founder working directly with the lead developers and code-geniuses behind the Thrive Theme Builder project to optimize the codebase of all of our tools.
We’re naming this Project Lightspeed, and we think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results.
What Does Project Lightspeed Involve?
Project Lightspeed, our code optimization project for WordPress, will happen quietly behind the scenes, without risking any unexpected behavior on your site.
We’ll roll out code improvements steadily, over the course of multiple release cycles, beginning with our release in early May 2021. (Note that Google updated their announcement, stating the algorithm update will rollout from mid-June 2021 until August.)
Want to get technical? Ok, here we go.
1. Modular CSS and Javascript files
We will move to modular management of our CSS and Javascript files, breaking them apart so the browser only loads what is required for a specific page.
Previously, we served one consolidated CSS file to take advantage of browser caching. That means once your visitors have downloaded the file the first time they’ve visited the site, there’s no more CSS for them to download as they move around your website, meaning a larger upfront download in exchange for faster navigation on other pages.
However, according to Google’s Core Web Vitals, they don’t care for browser caching, only the initial page load. So by breaking apart our CSS and Javascript files this way and loading only what is necessary per-page, it reduces the First Input Delay load every time.
In order to do this, we’re working on a system to compile CSS and JS files per element on save. This concerns how those CSS and JS files are built. When you click ‘save’ in our visual editor, it will scan the page for your chosen elements to build a unique CSS file and will only load the JS files necessary for that content. These files will be automatically minified and cacheable.
2. Inline Theme Structure CSS
We’re testing an option to load theme structure CSS inline, meaning you can choose not to store it in an external file. All other CSS resources that don’t contribute to page structure will be stored in an external file loaded from the website footer (websites load top-to-bottom, meaning code in the footer is the last to be executed).
This means the visual structure of your page will load very quickly, while the rest of the CSS resources are loaded after the shape of the page is assembled. You can expect faster Largest Contentful Paint and lower Cumulative Layout Shift, provided our testing proves that Google sees these changes favorably.
3. Lazy Loading of Files and Code Assets
This is still explorative work at the moment and what we do in this area depends on the results of our tests. By lazy loading assets, we can defer the download of specific scripts or files in a webpage that aren’t important in the first few seconds that a visitor arrives on your site.
4. Other Advanced Enhancements
After we are satisfied with the bulk of our optimizations as the 80/20 of our code optimization, we’re going to explore DOM optimization to flatten the HTML, as well as some more innovative ways to improve our code. Most of these require explorative work and trial & error before we can even tell if they’ll pay off. But the point is that we’d like to go above and beyond... but only if our tests prove that it’s beneficial.
5. Site Speed Education
We don't expect you to understand all of the technical factors involved in site speed. That's why we develop software, and you run your online business. But we know that many of you look to us for advice and education with your website, and for us to debunk false myths and teach you what matters. Which is why we made the DecPlay Project Lightspeed case study to showcase our efforts with Project Lightspeed so far.
Later in the year, we're looking to create a compact Thrive University course that will educate you on everything you actually need to know on speed optimization in a single day... without wasting time on the things that don't matter. You'll be able to take the course, make sense of the nonsense, tweak the right settings, and move on.
Work With Us
I want to take a moment to reassure you that Core Web Vitals at Thrive Themes is something we are quite dedicated to. As a customer, you see the fantastic new features that we release every 3 weeks. They get the lion’s share of attention.
But behind the scenes, our product team is always exploring how we can truly help you to create a better website and a better business with our tools.
We have conversations daily where we explore your biggest frustrations in website building, scrutinize our own software, and discover new ways that we can deliver improvements and features that we know will help which is why Project Lightspeed is still a working progress
We see our role as working with you and for you, to help your businesses grow.
For now, we encourage you to get good hosting, set up site caching and image optimization, and then leave the rest with us.
Head of Product
Thrive Themes
That’s a great update going to be. Thank you Brad for this detailed write-up explaining core web vitals.
Apart from these necessary speed improvement update, what we users are currently facing is the frustration behind selecting a single Font for the whole website in the simplest manner. Font selections are distributed in every single elements used in architect and some pre-made blocks/elements/menu has set its own font. Its very difficult to find each and every element and change its font style.
Why don’t we simply have one separate section which controls all the fonts loaded in website? (Note: The section Typography do work 50% and rest fonts are loaded from other thrive architect blocks/elements making multiple font loading in site without the actual need)
There is a post made in Facebook Group too and many people supported this issue which Thrive has and wish for a better solution. (Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/383136866154053/permalink/509828503484888/)
I agree completely to Nitesh. Although this topic does not really fit here – production speed advantage is quickly used up because fonts and colors are not adopted. By the way, this also applies to the new generation of Thrive smart landing pages.
This is good news and thanks for sharing.
I wish the Thrive team would have announced this months ago. Many people, myself included, have started investing in newer builders because Thrive (even fully optimized) is far too slow.
I’ve yet to find any Thrive site that can pass mobile core web vitals (desktop is easy) so hopefully this Project Lightspeed will address it.
Appreciate the transparency on the rollout phase, and please keep the details and timeline coming!
Hey Jordan, I get your frustration. The difficulty is that anytime we mention future plans, it gets perceived as a guaranteed promise, when in reality- all kinds of technical issues can interrupt what we’re working on. Core Web Vitals is an exception now, but when we were running inconclusive tests we simply couldn’t yet speak of our plans. The good news is that yesterday at nearly the same time as I published this post, Google changed their timeline to “beginning to roll out mid-June gradually until August”.
Thanks, Bradley.
Understand the timing. However, serious web devs have been planning for core web vitals since Google announced it in November 2020. Even a vague update — hey, we’re working on this in 2021 — would have been helpful.
Important to remember — there’s a lot of people who have been using Thrive on countless sites for many years. Months of silence on a huge issue like this seems like decades. That can be tough for businesses that rely on website performance who are using Thrive’s products.
Most of the page builders in your space either immediately made updates or at least announced intentions to. Just my 2 cents. =)
Yeah, I got similar feedback from a few others too. And it’s fair feedback. Even though we weren’t sure what we could do about it at the time, in hindsight I can see how it would have been better to communicate something/ anything earlier. I’ll make a note of it for next time. I appreciate the honest feedback.
Excellent round up and thank you guys for having our back!
Thanks John
Great news!
Thanks for the update on this area. Your article came in timely as I am preparing on this coming update. Really appreciate on optimizing the codes. I guess its a LOT of hardwork for your team.
FYI, I tested on optimole, and it’s quite bad on how the images appear on the mobile after the caching. I am not quite why this solution is suggested at TT. Maybe its better to look at other solutions. For lazy loading on images, which plug in do you recommend?
Hey Cheefoo, you’re not wrong- it is a lot of hard work, but we’re seeing encouraging results. Regarding Optimole, when you say ‘quite bad’, what do you mean exactly? Grainy? Low quality? We communicate directly with the Optimole team so I’d like to know more and share your feedback with them.
Try zooming out the images on the phone, it’s bad quality for optimole. I tested it some time ago, and immediately uninstalled. The images look ok after the uninstall. Shortpixel might be better.
Hi Cheefoo,
Marius from Optimole here.
It might be some misconfiguration on your end, could you please share your site to have a quick look? You can also contact us at https://optimole.com/#contact to troubleshoot the issue together.
Just a quick guess based on your comment, on the settings tab -> Compression do you have the Enable network based optimizations toggle ON?
You could experiment with that off and see how it goes.
Looking forward to helping you!
Marius, you can take a look at this thrive themes blog on a mobile phone. TT is also using your plugin. Try zooming in any of the picture, the quality becomes very bad.
Hi Cheefoo,
Do you mean when the site is loaded on a phone and you zoom ( pinch ) the screen to view the image?
If so, indeed the image is automatically resized at the exact size of the content where is used to ensure maximum speed. Rescaling images to match the content layout is something that Google PageSpeed Insights is recommending, see Properly size images audit rule.
However, to overcome this there are settings to disable Scaling ( see Lazyload -> Scale Images ). For retina screens, this enabling retina compatibility should improve this too.
I hope this helps.
Thanks for your reply. So if we disable scaling, the image will look ok when zoom on mobile ? If yes, it’s worth another try. But, I guess it will slow down the speed ?
Hi Cheefoo,
Yes! This depends on your use case and how big you have the images in their original form. Experimenting with settings to find the ideal case would help a lot.
This is really good news, thank you! We’ve been working on this a lot over the past few weeks and have come a long way. Our desktop load times are really good. For mobile, on the other hand, they still need a lot of improvement. Most important recommendation from Google: “Try to specify important JS and important CSS inline, and defer all non-critical JS and styles.” So exactly what you guys are announcing. Great!
Besides that, the recommendation is to remove unused CSS and JS. No idea if that’s even possible with a content builder.
Yeah that’s possible, we’re working on exactly that right now. Our tests are showing encouraging results..
Staying ahead of the curve like always. Thank you for the coverage Brad – and thank you Thrive for endeavouring on Project Lightspeed.
I use thrive theme builder on my sites and I’ve already paid for a developer to begin work on core web vitals for my site. Will this be an issue once you guys implement your own updates?
Without knowing what your developer has done, I can’t really answer. But for our first update, we’re looking to make it an opt-in setting, meaning you can choose to enable or disable the optimization. That should mean you can try it out and if anything breaks, disable it straight after. We’ll have more info about this closer to our May release.
Hi Brad,
This is fantastic news.It sounds like all speed issues and recommendations I get from GTmetrix and Pingdom will be solved soon. And I don’t need to get too nerdy, -)
many thanks!
That’s amazing. On my non-Thrive website I had to work three weeks on the speed, by hand, but it was worthwhile, it tripled my income from the website. Now I hope the same for my Thrive website – only without that annoying handwork. 🙂
Thank you for all the improvements you constantly make!
Btw., does that mean, that, for Thrive websites, also the above-the-fold hassle is over, because that’s taken care of by you?
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
By hand?! I’m curious to know what changes you made!
Regarding above-the-fold, we’ll see. What particular part of the ‘hassle’ are you referring to? Above-the-fold load times be improved by the inline theme CSS on theme templates, but for landing pages- we’ve got some more investigating to do.
Nothing fancy, I just tried to follow every single hint by Google’s Pagespeed Insights – and brought the loading time from about 2,7s down to 0.869s, which was rewarded by some 1st positions for a bunch of medium keywords. But honestly, I wouldn’t want to do that again. That’s why I am rather excited by your announcement. Looking forward to all of it! 🙂
That’s an impressive result! I hope we can help automate that process, yeah. But we can only do so much before other optimizations unrelated to our code need to be tweaked
Thanks for speaking out about this. My eyes are hurting from excessive rolling at all the Facebook comments from TT users worried sick about their Pagespeed scores, perhaps now we can get some peace and focus on actually doing some work. =P
Back to work– that’s a pretty good attitude to have! It all reminds me of the GDPR craze in 2018.
By the way, your Thrive University copywriting courses are still going strong!
Awesome Brad! You guys really listened to our concerns! Looking forward to May! Excited for the new changes!
Thank you.
You’re welcome! 😀
Ohhh that are great news! That´s what I am really looking for! Good luck for your development team 🙂 Do you know when the update will roll out?
Google’s algorithm update has been pushed back to a gradual release from mid-June to August. We’ll release our first optimization in early May, and build upon it on subsequent releases.
Thats great! Can you tell me: this updates effect only on thrive theme or also to the architect itself? Because I´m using just the architect in combination with the buddyboss theme.
It will affect Thrive Theme Builder and pages created with Thrive Architect. Basically wherever you use our visual editor.
yeeeeeeehaw!
Brad, this is an excellent explanation! I think it’s crucial that website owners really take the Pareto principle to heart!
There are probably a gazillion things one *could* do — endlessly tweaking the technical nuances of their website — but that’s certainly not the best use of an entrepreneur’s time… There is a business to run! Content to create… conversions to be made… That list is infinite as well! So it’s most efficient to take the 80/20 approach you have so elegantly outlined in this article!
I’m happy to let the Thrive developers figure out the most efficient way to satisfy Google’s ever-changing algorithms!
Thrive has never let me down before, and I’m sure your software engineers will nail this challenge just fine!
Thanks for the update! <3
Thank you, Karen. Keeping up with Google is a challenge, that’s for sure! But the key thing is, we have our best minds doing what we can about it.
“There is a business to run!” Wiser words have never been said. Thank you!
Thanks, Eli! I’ve been a student of Shane & his incredible team for several years! 😀
Very excited about this. We are always in search of site speed, and often at the expense of losing ourselves down the site speed rabbit hole.
I’d rather focus on creating quality content, than chasing speed. With Thrive doing this, it adds even more value to the product. Looking forward to seeing this in action. Thanks Thrive team!
It’s such a deep rabbit hole! Yeah, it would be very unusual for Google to knock a perfect webpage from the top spot because of how a CSS file is loaded. My guess is that this will help them choose between equally ideal pages and pick which one should be ranked higher. But we’ll have to wait and see!
Thank you for such a comprehensive article. I even understood virtually all of it! And great that you remind people that speed is but one of so many factors – there is no magic button.
I don’t mind telling you it’s a real relief seeing your statement about core web vitals at this time.
It’s unfortunate that for many business owners like myself, these fixes can’t come quickly enough.
Since the Google algorithm update in December, I lost 2/3 of my traffic through no fault of my own: I’ve always written quality articles with on-page SEO, I have a good fast host (WPX) and had implemented all the recommended settings in this article.
Support have tried their best to help, but I can’t help feeling that Thrive Themes should have made a statement like this much earlier.
Whether Thrive Themes dropped the ball on this one or Google has been over-aggressive in penalising sites – or failed to provide clarity to developers early enough (or both), only time will tell.
All that said, Thrive Themes have earned enormous respect from me (and, I know, many others) over the last few years, so I’ll trust you at your word that you’ll deliver these fixes in a timely fashion.
Hopefully, in another month, we can put all this behind us and see it as a ‘blip’ on Thrive Themes’ otherwise untarnished reputation.
Hey Tim, it sounds like there is a misunderstanding here. Google announced that their Core Web Vitals update would be coming in May 2021, and just yesterday at nearly the same time I published this post, they’ve amended that to a gradual roll out from mid-June 2021 to August.
So to be clear: this algorithm update has not happened yet.
What happened to your search rankings last year is from the different December 2020 algorithm update that you can read about here. Google roll out core updates multiple times a year, with little-to-no warning or information about what they’re changing. They do what they want, and everyone is left guessing as to what was changed and why. That’s why CWV is unique, because they’ve announced this update in advance.
This article addresses what to do if your rankings drop after a core update, and Google says it doesn’t mean something is wrong with your site that needs to be fixed. In fact, they say: “We know those with sites that experience drops will be looking for a fix, and we want to ensure they don’t try to fix the wrong things”.
I hope you recover some of those rankings. Remember, the best thing to do is focus on producing new high-quality content and updating old content.
Hi Bradley,
Thanks for your reply but I’ve been reading about that December update ever since it broke my rankings and I’ve seen clear evidence that Google has already done something with core web vitals: multiple “failed” validation attempts for my site in Search Console attest to that.
I managed to fix the CLS issues eventually but it still flags LCP as an issue with the featured image, despite the fact that I have everything set up with Optimole, etc in Thrive Theme Builder as you’ve described in this article.
These issues never appeared for my site in Search Console before the December update but they sure did the day after!
And from what I’ve read around the net, I know I’m not the only one to be affected.
Bear in mind that people affected by this are hurting at the moment, so please be careful of advising “write more quality content”.
Having done that all along, it feels like a kick in the teeth, which I know is not your intention.
Just get those fixes done ASAP and we can all move on!
Sure, I understand. Yeah, it was definitely not my intention to deliver a ‘kick to the teeth’, I appreciate that you see that wasn’t my intent, and I’m sorry the rankings drop is hurting your business. All I have is Google’s word that their CWV update is rolling out in mid-June 2021. Either way, we’re pressing on with this code optimization project and will get it out when we can.
Thanks, I appreciate it.
Looking forward to being wowed by the team once again! 🙂
Great stuff, Brad and the rest of the TT team! That is why I love TT and have invested in the annual membership. Best investment EVER!!!!!!!
Exceptional! That’s why I love ThriveThemes! <3 much love and appreciation for keeping up with the increasingly demanding exigence of Google's new algorhytms!
I’m very pleased with this guys. Thanks for taking CWV into consideration.
I have a question.
I’m still using the old FocusBlog theme along with Thrive Architect and Thrive Leads.
Will I benefit from project Lightspeed? I will appreciate if I don’t have to! Migrating to TTB is not an easy task for me as I have a lot of theme customizations 🙂
Thanks!
I’m very happy to hear about this project!
Great stuff, guys. I was getting slow loads on GTmetrix and PageSpeed. So I bought WP Rocket and their support suggested AssetCleanup plugin as well. Both have really helped.
Hello Brad, thank you for this great update.
Am really happy for the constant improvements.
Am a very happy customer since 2019!
A reminder or Inquiry!
Early last year you promised to look into the matter I raised to you;
About blacklisting specific email addresses from accessing my gated offers & emailsvia thrime leads, quiz and only allow business emails and avoid Gmail addresses. (Am into B2B space).
Any updates on this please?
That’s great to see, and I’ve tested Thrive’s Shapeshifter theme, but most of my existing sites run on a separate base theme + Thrive Architect, is all this speed optimization going to apply to Thrive Architect built pages as well?
Yes, it applies to everything in Thrive Suite
Awesome, thanks!
Fab post 🙂 Lots of very actionable and great advice.
But isn’t it a bizzare crazy word? A business gets its website ranked according to the user experience of the website not the business itself?
The window display may be old fashioned but the food is fantastic.
The signage is not attractive but the dentistry is great.
You get the idea.
Geeks and nerds (I used to be a developer myself so this applies to me) get their way rather than listening to proper adults who know about actual doing of business that involves hammers, anaesthetics, courts, paints, cutting grass, or whatever.
And when so many end users are busy running their business and have so little influence over the ability of the party that built their website, it gets even crappier.
Oh dear.
Google definitely have a lot of power, and with one change they can send ripples of panic worldwide. But, as I say- UX is going to be a factor, and the quality of content is always the highest priority.
Interestingly, Google just said yesterday they would delay the Core Web Vitals update to mid-June and release gradually over a few months. That is very unlike Google, and will mean we can get meaningful proof of the effects of the update while it is being rolled out.
Thanks for your comment, Paul
Glad to see Thrive is on top of it.
My attemtpts to have SEO and site speed “pros” increase my site speed has led to nothing but errors and malfunctions.
Thanks for the great work, Thrive.
Speed and code optimization is a serious challenge, that’s for sure. Thanks Scott!
I have been waiting for this news for a long time.
Glad you are also working on speed, so far a weakness of Thrivethemes (in my experience).
I am looking forward to these improvements. Thank you.
We’re looking forward to turning that around. Remember, Thrive is only one part of the jigsaw puzzle, but we’ll do our part to improve what we can
I really appreciate this posting and your efforts in general. Thanks, Brad!
Thank you Björn, we do our best!
I love your products and is great news you’re working on this. But I wonder if you, and all major page builders, will be able to achieve the level to compete with Oxygen Builder, LiveCanvas or themes like Astra or Kadence, that when using Gutenberg, you reach core vitals near 100%. If TT can reach same core vital scores, I’ll be more than happy to keep using my membership.
Of course attaining a high core vital score is possible – I think you’ll be very surprised with what we can achieve.
How easy is it to set up a landing page with lead generation capabilities, split testing both the landing page and the lightbox, then applying a time scarcity campaign on top of it to increase conversions for a special offer in Gutenberg and Kadence? 🙂
And do not forget…….
It just works! 🙂
Thanks for all the good work!
Amazing to know that you guys are thinking and doing a great job about it. Thanks! I know how hard it is.
This is a new challenge, that’s for sure! Thanks Martin
Hi BRad, I am so happy I can leave the rest with you and your team. Thanks for all the good stuff and the good communication. You are marvellous and surprises me again and again. Enjoy your time and don’t grow too big!
Thank you, Hans
I am a long time Thrive user. This is my best purchase in years of buying plugins and themes. I also have the Thrive Theme builder. I am working to have Thrive as the theme I use. I am using a theme right now that will fail the Google update. But I am using WPX, W3tc, Optimole. Now on to bigger and better things with Thrive. Ps. my site speed is 98 desktop, 94 laptop.
This timing is uncanny:
Literally hours after I published the above post, Google shared an amendment to their Core Web Vitals timeline, saying:
“We’ll begin using page experience as part of our ranking systems beginning in mid-June 2021. However, page experience won’t play its full role as part of those systems until the end of August.”
You can read about the new timeline here.
Thanks, great to know what is happening here.
Hi
What about people who don’t use the Thrive theme builder? I use the old legacy themes and Thrive Architect plus a whole load of your other plugins. Will the updates also make improvements to these products?
cheers
It will apply to anything that uses our visual editor. So, that excludes our legacy themes unfortunately, but it will apply to any Thrive Architect landing pages or content.
This are good news When it comes to wordpress / thrive architect, speed is always a critical factor. Nice that you are starting optimizing on all levels. That is another USP for thrive theme*
Why is Thrive still using jQuery and why is migrating to vanilla JavaScript not included in project goals? I see this as a great mistake – something that could be also improved upon.
I see a future where jQuery will not be included in WordPress by default and then Thrive will 100% have to migrate. Why not to do it earlier?
Hey Danielius, optimizing CSS and JS is a much greater point of leverage than rewriting all javascript. And we’re not convinced rewriting javascript would make a difference to performance, to be honest, so long as we aren’t adding any of our own jQuery. WordPress is very big on backwards compatibility, so we can’t realistically see them removing jQuery, since it would break millions of websites all at once.
Hmmm… Yeah, I have forgotten that backward compatability is a thing. That’s true 😀
Thank you for the heads up Bradley!
I am a huge fan and user of your products, but the truth is that up till now speed was not the strongest part of TT.
My question is about the rollout:
Will we have to “re-save” every existing landing page in order for the CSS and JS files to be compiled in the new (per element) way?
I am still dreadful of the transition from TCB to TA where I had to edit every existing landing page 🙂
I’m not 100% sure yet. It will depend on the results of our latest testing. We’re figuring out the finer details about opting in, meaning you choose when to apply the changes, but we’ll have more information about that soon. The worst case is that instead of editing pages, you enable the optimization at a page-by-page level. But that won’t require rebuilding any of your content
Thank you Bradley! Keep up the good work!
Will you be providing updates for Thrive Leads, as well?
Yeah, basically anything that uses the Thrive Editor to build will be improved. Including Thrive Leads forms, Quiz Builder results pages or opt-in pages, Thrive Ultimatum countdown timers, and whole pages in Thrive Architect or Theme Builder.