WordPress revealed that 6.3, which will be released in August 2023, will assist websites get higher Core Web Vitals SEO rankings, notably in the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) category.
While page speed is a minor ranking criteria in Google, it is crucial because it can increase sales and enhance ad views and clicks.
Focusing on user experience can influence how long a user stays on a website, whether they suggest it to others, and whether they return again and again.
A good user experience is essential for growing popularity, and Google Search, in my opinion, shows users what they anticipate for every given query.
Largest Contentful Paint
The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) statistic determines how long it takes to render the largest picture or text block. This metric’s core assumption is to indicate a user’s view of how long it takes to load a webpage.
What is being measured is the viewport, which is what the site visitor sees in their browser.
WordPress 6.3 optimizations complete a long-standing effort to accurately use HTML characteristics on certain elements to achieve the optimal Core Web Vitals performance.
Fetch Priority HTML Attribute
Fetch Priority, written in HTML as fetchpriority, is an HTML attribute of webpage elements (resources) such as images, CSS and JavaScript.
The purpose of fetchpriority is to tell the browser which webpage resources need to be downloaded fastest in order to render the content that a site visitor sees in their browser, what’s in their viewport.
Content that is not in the viewport, which is content that a user has to scroll down the page to see, has a lower priority than content that’s at the top of the page and in the site visitor’s viewport.
Fetch Priority enables a publisher to specify which resources are high priority and which are low priority.
WordPress 6.3 has a new feature that adds the fetchpriority attribute to the picture that is most likely to be displayed in the viewport of a site visitor.
The WordPress announcement noted:
“WordPress now automatically adds the fetchpriority attribute with a value of “high” to the image it determines most likely to be the “LCP image”, i.e. the image that is the largest content element in the viewport.
The attribute tells the browser to prioritize this image, even before it has computed the layout, which typically improves LCP by 5-10%”
One of the cool things that WordPress does with the fetchpriority is that it only applies to images of a minimum size threshold.
That means that the fetchpriority attribute will not be applied to small resources like a navigation button.
Another feature of the WordPress automatic fetchpriority is that it will never override an existing fetchpriority attribute.
