Heard about the Google Core Web Vitals project but not sure how it connects to your WordPress site? Or maybe you have no idea what the Core Web Vitals project is and why it matters for WordPress?

As a web developer or agency, you need to stay on top of the best practices for Core Web Vitals and WordPress. This guide by WP Rocket is going to cover everything you need to know about what they are, how to test them, and how to improve them to ensure your websites perform well and rank highly in search engine results, which will ultimately benefit your clients and their businesses.

What Are Google Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are a new initiative from Google designed to measure and improve user experience on the web. Instead of focusing on generic metrics like how long it takes your entire website to load, Core Web Vitals focus on how your WordPress site’s performance connects to delivering a high-quality user experience.

Users care about how fast they can start interacting with a page. That’s precisely what the Core Web Vitals metrics aim to measure.

Currently, there are three Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint (loading performance), Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability), and First Input Delay (interactivity).

According to Google, these metrics are the most important ones for providing a great user experience.

If you think that these names are confusing, and if you tend to mix one metric with another, don’t worry! We’ll explain each metric in the easiest way. We want you to understand what each Core Web Vital means and its impact on user experience.

It’s the first step for improving the scores and your overall SEO and WordPress performance.

Explaining Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how long it takes for the most meaningful content on your site to load – that’s usually your site’s hero section or featured image.

According to Google, how long it takes for a page’s main content to load affects how quickly users perceive your site to load.

Since images are often the largest content element on a webpage, optimizing their size and format can significantly improve LCP. This is one of the many perks of using Visual Composer, which reminds you to compress images on the go via the built-in content analysis tool - Insights to improve website performance.

Practical example: you land on a page and don’t see the top image fully displayed right away. You would be annoyed, right? You would even think about leaving the page right away. Here’s why the Largest Contentful Paint metric is closely related to user experience — more than the overall site’s loading time.

The LCP “element” is different for each site, and it’s also different between the mobile and desktop versions of your site. Sometimes the LCP element could be an image, while other times, it could just be text. You’ll get a clear example in the section on how to test and measure Core Web Vitals.

If you’re wondering what a good LCP time is, here are Google’s thresholds:

• Good – Less than or equal to 2.5 seconds
• Needs Improvement – Less than or equal to 4.0 seconds
• Poor – More than 4.0 seconds.

On a side note: LCP is very similar to First Contentful Paint (FCP), another metric included in PageSpeed Insights.

The key difference is that LCP measures when the “main” content loads. FCP is focused on just when the “first” content loads — which could be a splash screen or loading indicator, that’s a less relevant user-experience element.

Explaining Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

The Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures how much your site’s content “shifts” or “moves around” as it loads.

Practical example: you’re about to click on a link or CTA, and you can’t do it because your content has just gone down after being loaded. You have a terrible user experience, and that’s a layout shift. The same goes when you accidentally click the wrong button because the late-loading content caused a button to shift.

Or, have you ever been on a news website where the content in the article keeps shifting around as the site loads ads, and you are unable to keep reading? That’s a layout shift, too.

You can see from yourself how the cumulative layout shift is super annoying for users and how they will have a poor experience.

You can achieve visual stability with Visual Composer. It has been designed to handle CSS loading in a way that prevents content from jumping around during the initial load, to contribute to a better user experience.

Here’s how Google defines the CLS scores:

• Good – Less than or equal to 0.1 seconds
• Needs Improvement – Less than or equal to 0.25 seconds
• Poor – More than 0.25 seconds.

Explaining First Input Delay (FID)

First Input Delay (FID) measures the time between when a user interacts with something on your page (e.g., clicking a button or a link) and when their browser can begin processing that event.

Practical example: if you click on a button to expand an accordion section, how long does it take for your site to respond to that and show the content?

First Input Delay is probably the most complicated metric to understand and optimize for, also because it’s heavily affected by JavaScript.

Let’s say that you land on a site from mobile and click on a link, but you don’t get an immediate response. It could be because your phone is busy processing a large JavaScript file from that site.

That's why in Visual Composer all components are optimized to reduce the structural complexity of elements, resulting in a faster response time.

Here’s how Google defines FID scores:

• Good – Less than or equal to 100 ms
• Needs Improvement – Less than or equal to 300 ms
• Poor – More than 300 ms.

Do Core Web Vitals Affect SEO as a Ranking Factor?

In June 2021, Google started using Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor – therefore, these metrics can affect your SEO performance.

Core Web Vitals are now part of the Page experience signals, together with HTTPS-security, safe-browsing, mobile-friendliness, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.

Core Web Vitals affects both mobile and desktop organic results, as well as whether or not your site appears in Top Stories. Previously, your site needed to use AMP to appear in Top Stories. That is no longer the case, but your site needs to meet specific minimum Core Web Vitals scores to appear in Top Stories.

What’s more, Google has indicated that all Core Web Vitals need to be met in order to improve organic ranking. And, although Google states that the Core Web Vitals score for noindexed pages is not used for ranking purposes, it may matter too.

As we mentioned previously, the Visual Composer content analysis tool provides smart scenarios according to the best SEO, accessibility and performance practices on how your content should be optimized in order to rank and provide a better user experience.

In short: if you care about your SEO performance, improving your Core Web Vital scores is now mandatory.

How to Test & Measure Core Web Vitals on WordPress

You can test and measure the Core Web Vitals with all of Google’s tools for web developers, from PageSpeed Insights to the Chrome DevTools, the CrUX Report, and much more.

As you can see in the image below, Google’s tools measure all the three metrics — except for Chrome DevTools and Lighthouse.

These two tools use the Total Blocking Time as a proxy for the First Input Delay. That’s because FID can only be measured with real user data (Field Data), whereas Lighthouse only provides Lab Data.

If you prefer using another performance tool, you should know that both GTmetrix and WebPageTest have started to use the Lighthouse performance score.

Keep in mind that both tools only provide you with the Largest Contentful Paint and the Cumulative Layout Shift scores.

The reason is always the same: the First Input Delay can only be measured with real user interaction, and these tools rely on the Lighthouse Lab Data.

Let’s now go over two of the most popular tools: PageSpeed Insights and Search Console. The first one helps you detect individual page issues; the other allows you to diagnose sitewide problems.

How to Test and Measure the Core Web Vitals with PageSpeed Insights

The easiest way to test your site’s pages against Core Web Vitals is via Google PageSpeed Insights.

Google’s tool provides data on all three metrics and gives specific recommendations to improve their performance.

The Diagnostics section will become your best ally to get a better score!

Just plug in your site’s URL, and you’ll see Core Web Vitals metrics in both the Field Data (based on the CrUX report) and the Lab Data (based on Lighthouse 6.0).

The Core Web Vitals metrics are marked with a blue ribbon – as long as you get it, you meet the threshold required by Google.

Learn how websites built with Visual Composer - a React-based website builder perform with WP Rocket - the top caching plugin for WordPress here.

You should keep in mind some notes:

• The Core Web Vitals scores can slightly differ between the Field and Lab Data. In the screenshot above, LCP is 1.8 s according to the Field Data and 2.2 s in the Lab Data. That’s normal, and it depends on how data is collected.
• Not having any Field Data when running your test is not an issue. It’s because there’s not enough real user data available. It doesn’t impact your Core Web Vitals because PageSpeed Insights considers the
• Lab Data for the page speed score. If you’re wondering what happens with the First Input Delay, not included in the Lab Data, you’ll get your answer in a few lines!
• Always check both the mobile and desktop results. Your Core Web Vitals metrics will differ between the two. Keep in mind that the mobile score is the most relevant and the most challenging.

A website that is fully responsive can help to improve Core Web Vitals as it ensures that the website adapts to different devices and screen sizes.

You can utilize both the custom and automated responsiveness features of Visual Composer to ensure you create mobile-friendly designs while building the website.

Let’s now look at how you can use PageSpeed Insights to identify the Core Web Vitals elements that need improvement.

Discovering the Largest Contentful Paint Element with PageSpeed Insights

As we explained, the LCP score measures how long it takes for the most meaningful element to become visible to your visitors.

To discover your site’s Largest Contentful Paint element, scroll down to the Diagnostics section and expand the Largest Contentful Paint element tab.

There, Google will display the HTML for the element that it’s using to measure LCP.

For example, on the desktop version of the WordPress.org homepage, the LCP element is an image:

However, on the mobile version of the site, the LCP element is the subheading text:

Discovering the Cumulative Layout Shift Elements with PageSpeed Insights

Quick recap: the Cumulative Layout Shift deals with how your site loads and whether or not your content “moves around” as new content is loaded.

To find the individual elements on your site that are “shifting” and affecting your score, go to the Avoid large layout shifts section in the Diagnostics area:

Discovering First Input Delay and Total Blocking Time with PageSpeed Insights

First Input Delay is about user interaction, remember? Meaning, how long it takes for the page to respond after interacting with an element such as a link or a button.

That’s why FID is based on actual user data, and you won’t find its score in the Lab Data. As we explained, you’ll only see FID times in the Field Data section — and only if the CrUX report has collected enough data.

In the Field Data, Total Blocking Time (TBT) will replace First Input Delay.

As long as you improve your Total Blocking Time, you’ll likely improve the FID score.

If you have a bad TBT score, you should go to the Minimize third-party usage section in the Diagnostics section.

Here, you’ll see what you can minimize in terms of third-party usage. It’s one of the main performance issues you need to solve – unless it’s already solved and included under the “Passed audits” sections, as you can see below:

How to Read the Core Web Vitals Report on Search Console

If you want to diagnose issues with your site as a whole, you should use the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console.

The report is based on an aggregate of real users’ data from CrUX. For this reason, the data included in the report could take a while before reporting issues. That’s why the Lab Data from Lighthouse is always valuable.

That said, the Core Web Vitals report is great to identify the groups of pages that require attention – both for desktop and mobile.

Once you open the report, you’ll find a Details tab that groups the URL performance by several criteria:

• Status (Poor or Need improvement)
• Metric type (e.g., CLS issue: more than 0.25 (desktop))
• URL group (the list of URLs with similar performance).

Once you have fixed the URLs that needed an improvement, you’ll also be able to click on the Validation column and move forward with the “Validate Fix” option. Keep in mind that the validation process takes up to two weeks — be patient!

How to Measure Core Web Vitals with Chrome Extensions

If you’re looking for a useful Chrome Extension, you could choose Web Vitals.

It gives you the Core Web Vital scores for any page you’re browsing:

You may also want to try CORE Serp Vitals, which shows you the Core Web Vitals results directly on the SERP. Remember that you need to enter a Chrome UX Report API key to let the extension work.

How to Improve Core Web Vitals on WordPress

Now for the critical question — if you aren’t currently meeting Google’s recommendations for the three Core Web Vitals metrics, how can you optimize your WordPress site to improve your Core Web Vitals scores?

The strategies are different for each metric. Most optimizations involve implementing WordPress performance best practices, though with a few points of emphasis — and that’s why choosing the best WordPress caching plugin will help you with no effort from your side.

Watch the video to understand how to optimize your Core Web Vitals, and keep reading to learn more about it.

How to Improve Largest Contentful Paint on WordPress

Optimizing for Largest Contentful Paint is the most straightforward metric as it’s pretty much entirely WordPress performance best practices:

• Set up page caching. Page caching speeds up how quickly your server can respond and reduces the server response times (TTFB). Did you know that WP Rocket - the top caching plugin for WordPress enables this automatically?
• Optimize browser caching. You should set the right option for the static files that your browser keeps in its cache. By doing so, you’ll address the “Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy” PageSpeed Insights recommendation. Guess what? WP Rocket enables the optimal expiration length automatically.
• Optimize your images. A lot of times, your LCP element will be an image. Optimizing your images will speed up your site and address PageSpeed recommendations such as “Properly sized images”, “Defer offscreen images”, “Serve images in next-gen formats”, and “Efficiently encode images”. You can use Imagify or other plugins to optimize WordPress images automatically.
• Optimize your code. Loading unnecessary CSS or JavaScript files before your main content will slow down the loading time. You can fix this by eliminating render-blocking resources on your WordPress site. You should also minify CSS and Javascript files and remove unused CSS. Optimizing your code will help you address the “Avoid chaining critical requests” PageSpeed recommendation. Once again, you’ll get most of the job done by setting these optimizations up in the File Optimization tab in WP Rocket.
• Use server-level compression. Using Gzip or Brotli compression will reduce your site’s file size, which speeds up LCP and addresses the “Enable text compression” recommendation. WP Rocket automatically enables Gzip compression.
• Use preconnect for important resources. Preconnect lets you establish important third-party connections early and addresses the “Preload key requests” and “Preconnect to required origins” recommendations. You can learn more in this tutorial.
• Use a content delivery network (CDN) for global audiences. If you have a global audience, a CDN can speed up your LCP time for visitors around the world. It’s another effective way to reduce the Time to First Byte (TTFB). You can use the RocketCDN service or Indystack Managed Cloud Hosting for WordPress which offers a free built-in CDN powered by DigitalOcean.

The easiest way to implement most of these best practices is to use WP Rocket. WP Rocket will automatically apply page caching and server-level compression as soon as you activate it. It also includes other features to help you optimize your site’s code and performance, all of which improve your LCP time.

How to Improve Cumulative Layout Shift on WordPress

Optimizing for Cumulative Layout Shift is a little more technical because it deals more with your site’s code.

Some of the most common problems and fixes are:

• Fix images without dimensions – if you add images via the WordPress editor, WordPress automatically adds dimensions for you. However, make sure to add dimensions if you’re manually adding images anywhere using your code. You’ll then address the best practice for serving scaled images.
• Fix ads, embeds, and iframes without dimensions – just as with images, loading embeds without dimensions can also cause problems. Make sure to always specify sizes when using these embeds. Or, if placing ads, make sure to “reserve” space for each ad.
• Optimize web fonts (FOIT/FOUT) – if you’re using custom web fonts, a late-loading font can cause issues such as Flash of Invisible Text (FOIT) or Flash of Unstyled Text (FOUT). As a result, you won’t follow the PageSpeed recommendation: “Ensure text remains visible during webfont load”. One strategy to fix this is web font preloading. If you need help, keep in mind that WP Rocket automatically optimizes Google Fonts. Additionally, the Visual Composer Font Manager allows you to choose from all Google Fonts to apply throughout your site, without depending on the theme-defined fonts. As for other fonts, the WP Rocket plugin helps you solve the issue through the Minify or Combine CSS option — already mentioned for improving LCP (Optimize your code).
• Be careful with injected content – don’t dynamically inject any content above existing content unless it’s in response to a user’s action.

How to Improve First Input Delay on WordPress

Optimizing for First Input Delay is the most complicated because it entirely deals with code. Specifically, you’ll want to limit heavy JavaScript execution so that the browser can still respond to user interactions quickly.

You should start by eliminating unnecessary JavaScript, if possible.

By doing so, you’ll address PageSpeed recommendations such as “Reduce javascript execution time”, “Remove unused JavaScript”, and “Minimize main thread work”. The Delay Javascript Execution feature and the Load Javascript deferred option provided by WP Rocket will help you deal with these issues.

As for the LCP, optimizing your code and images, using server-level compression, and using preconnect for important resources can help you improve your FID score.

In general, improving FID can be difficult if you’re not a developer. That’s why WP Rocket can help you save time and energy. If you want to dig deeper, though, Google has a good explainer on the more technical parts of optimizing this metric.

Tips to Boost Your WordPress Performance if Core Web Vitals Don’t Improve

What if you start applying the PageSpeed Insights recommendations and your Core Web Vitals grades are not as good as you would expect?

Take a look at the suggestions we listed for you. Your WordPress performance will likely improve by following these tips:

• Choose a fast hosting provider. Hosting affects server responsiveness, which plays a significant role in the LCP grade. If you’re using shared hosting, you may want to consider switching to either a dedicated one and get excellent server performance, or cloud hosting for improved LCP grade through optimized server responsiveness, scalability, and better infrastructure.If you're looking for an all-in-one solution for website development, you can also launch Visual Composer Premium with cloud hosting here.
• Don’t overlook image optimization. We’ve mentioned above how image optimization can affect both LCP and FID grades. These scores are also the most relevant ones for the overall PageSpeed score.
• Use only essential and lightweight plugins, and optimize their performance. WordPress websites tend to use many plugins. The majority of these plugins impact the front end because of their JavaScript files – and you know how JS files are critical for your site’s performance. Let’s say that your site uses a plugin to create the contact form page. Even though the plugin is used for only a page, the plugin will load the CSS and JS files across the entire site — and these are 100% unnecessary files! You should use your plugins only on the dedicated pages. Asset CleanUp and Perfmatters (Script Manager feature) will help you enable your plugins only on the relevant pages and solve these JavaScript file issues.
• Take advantage of your page builder. Your page builder could also help you manage your file optimization. Check it out!

The best option to make your website perform from the start, is to take advantage of Visual Composer website builder for WordPress.

Through built-in SEO and performance optimization features, automatic and custom responsiveness settings, and compatibility with essential plugins, such as WPRocket, your websites will be ranking in no time!

Start Optimizing Core Web Vitals on WordPress Today

Now you know what Core Web Vitals mean and how they affect performance. It’s time to optimize your grades!

Not a WP Rocket customer yet? Save yourself time and let WP Rocket do the job for you. WP Rocket will automatically apply 80% of web performance best practices. You don’t even have to touch any settings. You’ll see an instant improvement to the naked eye in your Core Web Vitals scores right away.

What’s more, you’ll stop managing multiple web performance plugins. You will only need WP Rocket to achieve an excellent Google page speed score and loading time – no technical knowledge required.

And, if you're looking for a low-code website building solution for WordPress to improve your website's overall performance, Visual Composer offers free and paid options to explore.

Looking to add some visual flair and consistency to your WordPress website? Button groups can be an effective way to achieve both.

By combining multiple buttons together, you can create a design element that enhances usability and aesthetics, while providing clear options for users to navigate, sort, filter, and take action.

Fortunately, with Visual Composer, adding multiple buttons in the same line in WordPress is quick and easy. In this guide, we'll show you how to do it with just a few simple steps.

Creating a Button Group in Visual Composer

This tutorial requires the premium version of Visual Composer. So, to begin, make sure you have Visual Composer installed and activated on your WordPress website.

If you are just getting started with Visual Composer, we recommend you follow our guide for articles and video tutorials to help you get familiar with creating a new page, navigating the interface, as well as adding and editing elements with Visual Composer.

First, you will need to select any page or post where you wish to place the button group. Or if you’re creating a new one, click on “Add New with Visual Composer” from your WordPress Dashboard. Once you're in the editor, follow the instructions below.

1. Add the “Button Group” element. Click on “Add Content” or “Visual Composer Hub” from the left sidebar. Select “Button Group” from the list of available elements, and drag it into your row.
2. Delete the extra outlined button. The “Button Group” element includes two differently styled buttons - select the filled button and delete the other for consistency.
3. Clone the button. To do so, hover over the button and click on the “Clone Basic Button” until you have 2 separate buttons within the button group element.
4. Adjust the text for each button. Hover the first button and click on 'Edit', and change the button text. Repeat for each button. In this case, we're changing the button text to “Sign in” and “Register”.
5. Remove the gap between the buttons. Open the “Button Group” element edit window and change the button gap to 0. By default, it is 20 px.
6. Add a border between the buttons. Click on 'Edit' on any button and add a 1px border (for the left side button the right border, or vice versa) in the “Design Options”. These lines will help us separate the buttons from each other visually.
7. Change the border color to your desired shade. In the same place where we adjusted the border, you need to change the border color to a lighter or darker shade, than the button ifself. This will help us achieve contrast.
8. Change the shape of your button group. To give our button group a round shape, we will need to click on 'Edit” for each button and add a radius for each outer corner (for the left side button, the left side radiuses, and vice versa). In our case - 50px to achieve a fully rounded shape.
9. Adjust the button size. To do so, click on 'Edit' for each button and use either the sizing options (this will also affect the button text font size) or use paddings in the Design Options.
10. Add functionality to your buttons. Click on 'Edit' for each button in the group, and with the help of the link selector, add a destination URL, display dynamic content, or trigger a popup - the choice is yours.

In this quick tutorial, we'll show you how to set up and add SVG masks to images using Visual Composer (and custom CSS) for your WordPress website.

Plus, we have created a set of trendy SVG shapes you can download for free and use on your own site. Scroll down to discover.

SVG masking allows you to customize the appearance of elements by applying shapes from SVG files as masks and avoiding adjusting every single image.

Adding Custom SVG Mask To Image in Visual Composer

To give you an idea of what we'll be creating using an SVG mask from our free kit, look at the image before and after below.

Good time management skills are crucial for any profession. It allows you to get things done, do the right thing, and avoid burnout.

There are those who handle it better than others, but I doubt there is a person who has never thought about it. We all want to accomplish more and avoid wasting time on insignificant questions.

Today, I want to share with you tips from one of our long-time teammates.

Rohan Khandeparkar is a Visual Composer support team lead who handles customer requests for both - Visual Composer and WPBakery. It has always been a secret how he manages to address all the tickets and keep the satisfaction rate as high as 94%.

And this is why we invited Rohan to do an internal educational event on his time management practices.

But why keep it to ourselves? As sharing is caring - we want our customers and readers to discover new ways to handle their time in a better way.

Before we begin - time management matters

In case you think that time management is something that everyone is aware of - think twice.

Only 18% of individuals worldwide have a dedicated time management system in place. An average worker spends more than 50% of their time working on low to no-value tasks. On 20% of people feel that their work is under control.

These are some stunning numbers and you can easily find more statistics to prove - time management is a thing.

What does it mean for you and your business? It seems that half of everything you do as a company is a waste of time.

It also means that there is an opportunity out there.

With proper time management in place, a company that is half-size of its competitors can win the market.

It also gives your teammates confidence that they are working on something meaningful.

What would Rohan do?

It all starts with planning. Whatever you do - you need to have the plan to follow.

A good plan will ensure that you know exactly what to do and will help you measure your success.

What Rohan suggests is to think ahead and have your plan for the next week ready by Friday.

It does not mean that you are all set up. As we run the support team meetings on Monday, it is ok to make changes once you have new variables to operate with.

Moreover, you can make adjustments to your plan on a daily basis if you feel that you are missing out on something rather important.

Think about it:

• Start with the planning
• Plan for a week ahead
• Adjust your plan during the week

LinkedIn is the most powerful business networking platform for B2B companies. If you’re not using it to win more business for your agency, you’re missing out on a golden opportunity.

In this article, I’ll show how using LinkedIn can help you start filling your pipeline with high-quality leads and increase your own authority in your industry.

First, let me introduce myself, I’m a Web Developer at a digital marketing agency in the UK called FINALLY Agency. As a B2B agency, we are big fans of LinkedIn, and for me personally, it has helped me build a personal brand that has generated leads and new business.

My LinkedIn content is all about websites and how to turn them into lead-generating machines. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and check out my content.

Why You Should Use LinkedIn to Grow Your Business

LinkedIn is no longer a corporate, job- searching, CV- sharing platform. It is a business social network where you can talk about anything and have genuine thought-provoking conversations.

The best thing right now is the organic reach that LinkedIn gives you compared to other social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Reports suggest that less than 1% of the total LinkedIn users are posting content on the platform. This means there’s a greater opportunity to get your content seen compared to other social platforms as there’s less saturation which makes it easier to grow a following.

Many businesses have a presence on every social media platform. This is a big mistake, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

"Nobody wants to be a jack of all trades and a master of none."

Refine your efforts to just one platform, and concentrate your efforts on building an engaged audience.

It’s important to choose the right platform where the majority of your target audience is hanging out. For B2B companies, LinkedIn is the platform of choice. If you’re B2C, perhaps Instagram would be a better fit. Once a small following has been made and you have been consistently posting each day, you should have made some valuable connections, generated a few leads, and maybe even won some new business. From personal experience, it took me roughly four months to win any new business from my LinkedIn, but I’ve seen some new creators win work within just one month!

Why a Personal Brand Is Better than a Company Profile

There are two types of profiles you can have on LinkedIn. These are your own personal profile or a company page profile. You can post from either of these profiles, but one will give you far greater results than the other.

A LinkedIn personal profile will give you a better organic reach in the algorithm compared to a company profile. Therefore, it is important to utilise your own personal profile and to create a personal brand instead of heavily relying just on your company brand.

Personal brands are powerful because people buy from people.

“When you think Tesla, you think Elon Musk. When you think Microsoft, you think Bill Gates.”

Having that figure to represent your business makes all the difference. Some other examples of great personal brands are Gary Vaynerchuk, Marcus Sheridan, Steven Bartlett, who all own/have owned marketing agencies.

How to Use LinkedIn to Grow Your Business

The first steps for a LinkedIn newbie would be to turn on LinkedIn Creator Mode, as this will give you more features and transform your Connect button into a Follow button instead. Once this is active, you need to optimise your profile with your target audience in mind.

Here are some steps to get you started optimising your LinkedIn creator profile:

1. Upload a profile picture - make it stand out and clearly show your face.
2. Upload a profile banner - this is some great real estate to advertise your services, so use it wisely.
3. Create a Headline that tells people what you do, who for and how you can help.
4. Use your About Section as your online pitch - hook in potential leads and pitch them your solutions and tell them your story
5. Add your website link that will appear at the top of your profile or a link to anything you want to drive traffic towards.
6. Add relevant Topics (hashtags) around your niche as these will show potential followers what you post about most
7. Update your careers section - make sure this is up to date and add some links to external documents, photos, sites, videos, and presentations to show off your work.
8. Display calls to action (CTAs), offers, case studies, and the most popular posts in your Featured section.

Once your profile is up and running and fully optimised as a true creator profile, it is now time to start posting content.

LinkedIn Content Creation Tips

When you’re just starting out on your LinkedIn journey, it’s difficult to know what to post about. Some find it easy, but when I first started, I found it hard to know how technical to get being a developer and if developer content was relevant on LinkedIn at all. It turned out that people were hungry for website-related content.

For the first few months, it’s all about testing what works for your audience and what doesn’t. I quickly found that making my content as user-friendly as possible made it accessible to a wider audience.

There are some days where I post more technical content, but a good mix works best I find to hit different audiences, whether that be business founders, agencies or developers. As long as you can clearly show you know what you’re talking about, people will quickly gain trust and value your expertise more and potentially get in contact with you.

You can post as much as you like on LinkedIn. Some post every day, others every weekday and some even post twice per day. It’s entirely up to you and how much free time you have, but my personal preference is every weekday.

When I first started out, I posted twice a week, then it soon became three times, and then I just ramped it up to every weekday.

“Everyone’s preference is different, but what I can say is you get out as much as you put in, so don’t expect lots of new leads if you’re still only posting twice a week. “

It’s important to stay on top of people’s minds, so posting daily helps with that and enables your profile to grow much faster.

It’s very important to stick to your niche as much as possible to give a reason for people to follow you. If you post about anything and everything, you won’t have a strong enough hook for people to follow and they will soon get confused as to what you’re about. You need to show you’re human too; often real-life event posts attract the most engagement, so showing your personality and daily life struggles is natural and a good thing to post about. I personally avoid posting about politics or religion as those subjects can quickly alienate your audience and maybe even cause controversy, which I’m definitely not here for.

Why It’s Important Your Whole Business Is Active on LinkedIn

Want your engagement to increase even quicker? Then encourage your whole team to post.

If your business and its employees are active on LinkedIn, that's more eyes on your content and your company. Plus, your staff will each have their own connections too - widening your reach more than ever before.

FINALLY Agency used this exact method to get our own brand recognition up within the industries we were targeting, and the results were that it made an impact as people were complementing our LinkedIn content and influence. To this day, we have a few regular posters covering different niches within marketing, and the majority of the team is actively engaging with each other's content - encouraging others to engage and helping it get seen by more people.

How to Stay Consistent and Post Each Day

One of the biggest challenges with building a personal brand is keeping things consistent and turning up each day to post and actively engage with the community. Everyone has busy lives, but there are ways to manage your time effectively so you don’t get overwhelmed and end up missing days from posting or giving up entirely.

My first tip to stay consistent each day would be to batch-write your content for the week upfront. Block out an hour in your schedule each week to give you time to write at least five posts for the following week.

It’s far easier to write multiple posts in one go, instead of creating them every single day as life gets in the way sometimes. Once you have your batch of content written for the week, it’s time to schedule them so they get posted automatically each day which means one less thing to think about.

It’s important to reply to comments, but sometimes it can get overwhelming and distractions can occur, losing focus on your actual job.

“Therefore blocking out half an hour each day in your schedule to just focus on replying to comments and engaging on other people’s posts will help boost your own post and grow your personal brand further. “

If your time is too precious for LinkedIn and you’re really time-poor then you can always outsource your content writing to a LinkedIn ghostwriter or a social marketing agency. Not only will you have expert copywriters, but it will relieve some of the stress if there is other help available.

The Benefits of Building a Personal Brand

There are many benefits to building a personal brand - whether you’re a business owner or even an employee. The main benefit is that it can generate you leads which hopefully means winning some new business. Even as an employee at FINALLY Agency, I’ve won them business off the back of my LinkedIn influence.

Another benefit would be that it can bring you new job opportunities. Who needs a CV when you’re posting your knowledge and experiences every single day?

People will quickly start to feel like they know you and learn how good your skillset is, so don’t be surprised when you get new job opportunities. It can also generate you other opportunities such as speaking gigs, podcast appearances, guest blog posts, and maybe even sponsorships.

Ultimately though, you create new connections and build a community of like-minded people. Your network is one of the most important things you can build up and LinkedIn is the perfect platform to do it.

In Summary

If you’re a B2B business and looking to win more business, then LinkedIn is currently the best social platform to achieve this on.

Having a well-optimised profile, posting consistently every day, and embedding yourself within the LinkedIn community will help you reach your goals.

Focussing on your own personal brand is key (remember, people buy from people) so treat those new connections like you would new friends!

If you enjoyed this post and have any further questions then please connect with me on LinkedIn, and I’ll be happy to help.

Related articles:

• How To Succeed On Twitter As A Web Agency Owner And Use It To Win Business
• A Comprehensive Guide To Earning More As A Web Creator In 2022 And Beyond
• Why Ambitious Web Agencies Choose Visual Composer

Creating a form that converts visitors into leads is important for any company that uses its website for business and wants to get the most out of its marketing efforts. This is the case for B2B companies that aim to book the first meetings with potential buyers, but also for B2C companies that want to nurture their leads through email marketing.

According to Sumo, the average email sign-up rate ranges between 1.95% and 4.77%. While these percentages might seem low, email sign-up forms are still one of the most effective ways to generate leads to this day. With a healthy email sign-up rate considered to be above 2%, it's an attainable goal for any online business.

By following the industry best practices and avoiding common mistakes, you can get more users into your next stage of the funnel. This will help you apply a variety of email marketing strategies and ultimately boost your sales.

In this article, I will guide you on creating an effective email sign-up form that converts visitors to leads.

What constitutes an email signup form?

The email sign-up form is a simple way to collect visitor information for marketing purposes. The design should be simple, clear, and straightforward so that people can drop their emails without difficulty or confusion when they visit your site.

Sign-up forms can be placed as a pop-up on the website, in the sidebar for blog posts, or as the main call-to-action on a landing page. But, for a pop-up version, the form should have a clearly visible close button so visitors can close it if they are not interested.

A must-have field for the form is email - you want to collect email addresses, right? Data such as name, age, etc. can be collected based on the marketing campaign. But as we said before, the simpler a signup form is - the better conversion rates you can expect.

Note: Statistics show that popups perform significantly better than passive sign-up forms, which you can find at the bottom of most pages.

Best Practices

Following are some best practices to be followed while creating a signup form:

• A good signup form should have one or two fields and be easy enough to be filled in within seconds.
• The form headline should clearly state the benefit that the user will avail in return. It can be a weekly newsletter, offers, free e-books, etc.
• It’s best to stick to a one-column layout which makes it simple and less complicated.
• The user experience can be enhanced by giving them instant field feedback. For eg: There can be an alert about an incorrectly entered email id while they are typing it.
• The form colors must be in sync with site branding.

Note: A report by WPForms, found that marketers who use lead magnets (webinars, free materials, etc.) report 50% higher email sign-up conversion rates.

Things to avoid

Here are a few things that can be avoided to have a higher conversion rate:

• A signup form with more than two fields can result in fewer signups.
• Too many fine prints and links to terms and conditions should be avoided.
• Bad color scheme or fonts which are not clearly visible.
• Incorrect placement of field validation errors.

WordPress plugins for best email signup forms

WordPress repository has a lot of plugins that can be used for building an email signup form. We have curated a list of the following six plugins based on our experience:

1. MailPoet – emails and newsletters in WordPress:
   It offers a complete email marketing solution from your WordPress dashboard. You can create a marketing campaign, newsletter, and signup form. All this can be done without having to go to a third-party site.
   
   
2. MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress:
   This plugin offers seamless integration with Mailchimp. Using it, you can easily add a signup form created in a marketing campaign, to your WordPress site.
   
   
3. Contact Form 7 and Mailchimp:
   This is an add-on plugin of Contact Form 7. It works on expanding the standard form functionality. Using it, Contact Form 7 can be used as a signup form for the Mailchimp campaign.
   
   
4. Mailchimp addon of Gravity form:
   Similar to the above one, this is an add-on to the Gravity form plugin. It makes it possible to build a signup form using the Gravity form. This form can then be integrated easily with Mailchimp.
   
   
5. HubSpot – CRM, Email Marketing, Live Chat, Forms & Analytics:
   It offers seamless integration with HubSpot to display a signup form. Apart from this, it also allows integration with other HubSpot features. These include features such as live chat, analytics, etc. in the WordPress dashboard.
   
   
6. AWeber Signup Form:
   It integrates with AWeber's email marketing solution. The plugin provides a shortcode and a widget. These can be used to display the signup form from the email marketing campaign.

Social media is one of the most popular marketing strategies for a reason. It helps agencies connect with their existing and potential customers as well as promote their products and services.

We believe that everyone can grow and market their agency using social media. In this article, we will show you how to succeed on Twitter as a web agency owner and use it to win business.

My Background

I created my Twitter account back in 2013 but never used it unless there was a major news event taking place. One of those major events took place in 2019 that changed our lives forever. Just like everyone else, I started spending more time on social media platforms to get the latest news and fight off boredom.

One of the unexpected benefits of spending more time on Twitter was discovering an awesome tech community. I have been running my agency (Clio Websites) since 2007 but I didn’t know too many people in the web development space. Discovering the tech Twitter community was a game changer. I started following and interacting with both industry experts and new people that wanted to get into the industry.

The more time I spent in this community interacting with other like-minded people, the more my following increased. In addition, more opportunities opened up to market my business and promote my services as an agency.

How Twitter Can Benefit Your Web Agency

Twitter has helped us secure 2-3 quality leads every week. They contact us needing help with things that we often tweet about, such as improving their WordPress performance, building new WordPress websites, or providing SEO services.

In fact, Twitter is our most popular lead generator and it’s the largest traffic acquisition vehicle for our website.

Below are our weekly stats, which show the organic social traffic source:

Besides generating leads for our business, we have also found that having a large following on social media also provides the following benefits:

• Helps you meet and learn from other industry experts in your field
• Leads to exciting collaboration opportunities
• Generates opportunities for guest posts and features
• Creates new revenue streams through paid promotions
• Helps you promote your new products and services
• Can help you conduct market research in a form of surveys

And lastly, Twitter has led to making some really meaningful and impactful connections with industry peers and people that I now consider friends.

Checking Your DMs

In order to tap into these opportunities, you have to turn on your DMs. Sure you may get some spam, but most business inquiries will come through your DMs. This is why it’s really important to have your DMs turned on by default and to check them regularly. It’s also a great way to meet new people in your industry and engage with your audience.

Responding to everyone once you get to a certain level of followers is impossible, but answering some of your followers' inquiries can lead to higher retention and will result in fewer people unfollowing you. I am a firm believer in making connections and interacting with people using DMs, even if that is an unpopular opinion.

How to Get Started On Twitter

“Most people on social media only consume content, very few create unique content” - Nat Miletic

Creating a bio link for business needs or personal branding is quite essential nowadays. It can help you to boost your social media presence and support your marketing efforts.

In this article, we will talk about all you need to know about a bio link.

What is a Bio Link

A bio link is a website page that contains your links from social media such as websites, WhatsApp contacts, Instagram pages, Spotify links, and so on. This tool simplifies your profile, helps your followers find you on other platforms, and navigate between one link to another more easily.

Most social media platforms give you the opportunity to add a link in your profile in order to take your followers to either your website, products, content, other social media, or some other important link.

Why You Should Have a Bio Link

If you wonder if bio link is for you, here are some reasons why you should think about it:

1. A mini version of your website
   Sometimes the main website has extensive information that is actually harder to navigate. Some users are already familiar with your website, but for the most part, for new visitors, it is a bit harder to find relative information. This is when we, as web creators, can provide the most important information on our bio link.
   
   Apart from that, because bio links only provide important information, bio links also have better speed compared to your main website. Studies have found that speed is vitally important to improve conversions – Walmart famously found that for every 1 second a page loads faster, conversions increased by 2%.
   
   
2. Content marketers' best friends
   Web creators who do content marketing most likely will constantly push new content for their blog posts. It is a very good opportunity to promote new content in your bio link, so you can drive your followers to your latest content and increase your traffic.
   
   
3. Some social media sites only allow you to input 1 link in bio
   On platforms like Facebook and Twitter, adding a link to the homepage of your website may be more than enough since you can share clickable links to individual pages, products, or content in your posts.
   
   But it’s a little bit different with Instagram or Tik Tok. You will need accounts with 10,000+ followers to have the option to share links through stories, however, those who are still building their profile only have the option to put the link in their bio. It’s quite challenging to insert many links in the Instagram bio because they only provide a single link option on the profile.

That’s where many people like web creators, influencers, and freelancers, use a bio link tool to store all their important links in one place.

Why You Should Stop Using the Free Bio Link Tools (Linktree, etc.)

There are quite a few popular bio link tools such as Linktree, Mona, Campsite, etc. Regardless of how easy those tools are, I don't recommend using them if you have your own website and are building your own business. Here’s why:

1. You lose your branding
   The free version of those bio link tools like Linktree provides very limited branding options such as a limited handful of colors and fonts. Even on the paid version, you can’t easily match it to your own brand identity.
   
   
2. Another brands logo is visible
   Still issue in the free version, they will insert their logo on your page whether it’s on the bottom of your page or elsewhere. It will make your bio link looks unprofessional and can take the attention of your audience away from your links.
   
   
3. Bad for SEO
   Remember that not all of your visitors that visit your bio link will visit your website. Each time they visit your bio link, it can increase their domain authority. But it does not guarantee that your website will get the same benefit.

Based on those reasons, you should start considering creating your own bio link on your website. If you are using WordPress, you can create it easily using Visual Composer - Drag-and-Drop Website Builder.

Did you know that up to 30% of all customers who choose premium WordPress products are motivated by access to premium support rather than features?

That means customer support can become a cornerstone for your success. All you have to do is to become good at it.

While it may sound plain simple, customer support goes far beyond the support portal and managing issues.

At Visual Composer, we have always kept the customer experience as our top priority.

We have been known for good customer service since the beginning, but, during the last year, we made some extra steps to go from good to excellent.

Sounds too generic?

As of today, our customer satisfaction rate is at 94% - a way above the industry average. We have plenty of customer reviews highlighting our customer service. The average ticket response time is under one hour. Our online chat response time is under 30 seconds.

While we are not Zappos, there are things we have discovered that work great for WordPress businesses and a freemium model economy.

In this article, I will share 10 things that have helped us to improve our customer service and can apply to your business.

Know your geography

Where are your customers located?

Do you serve North American market with your headquarters located in Europe? Well, we do.

Imagine that our active support hours would be aligned with our location rather than where our customers are.

I believe our average response time would jump from less than an hour to something close to 8 hours. A disaster if we talk about getting things done on a short notice.

Building your support shifts based on your customer location is a must.
Whatever your next steps for improving your customer service are, setting up a proper shift schedule is the first thing you should do.

Plus, it is really easy to measure. Pay attention to your initial response time and average resolve time - these metrics will help you to understand if and how you should move your support shifts.

Support your free users

A freemium business model goes hand in hand with the WordPress economy.

It is obvious that all WordPress products have free versions available. And, it is obvious that support is usually a part of the premium deal.

Nevertheless, free users deserve your attention.

You may want to use an argument about those 30% of users who go premium because of support. Yes, but what we found out, it has nothing to do with the fact that you help your free users out.

In fact, a good customer service for your free users tends to be a great motivator to consider going premium.

Just like you want to build a closer relationship with people you like - your customers want to build their business relationships with reliable and trustworthy partners.

Plus, if you have a product on WordPress official theme and plugin repository, you may want to keep all your support issues resolved (usually opened by free users) since it has an impact on your theme and plugin rankings.

Manage availability

There are rare cases when your support is available 24/7. It asks for huge investments and may be harmful to your budget sheet.
At the same time, there is nothing worse than opening an online chat and understanding that there is no one to answer your questions.

To avoid such a frustration, we decided to constantly enable/disable tools that we are not able to serve at the moment.

If you see an online chat available on our site - we are there to answer you.

The same principle applies to contact forms and other communication widgets.

And, don't be afraid to remove things - your clients are not that stupid and will find their way around to reach out. At the end of the day, they were smart enough to purchase your product, right?

Think one step ahead and get personal

Is there anything else I can help you with? That's the least you can do.

Always think of the next step your customer is willing to take.

Did you customer asked about how to set up a contact form to capture leads? Give him/her the answer and suggest additional points for optimizing it.

Taking an extra step may help your customers to solve their next issue before they even know it.

On your side, it will help you build a strong relationship for further communication. Once you are friends with your clients, you can always ask for a review or a quick test-drive of your beta version.

Don't be afraid to share your personal email. Let people know that you are easy to reach.

Get your team involved

Customer support is the responsibility of all your team members.

While the support team is at the frontline of customer care, every team member should dedicate time talking (and helping) your clients.

We get our development team to address advanced customer cases. Our marketing team is involved in the communication.

Are you the CEO of the company with lots on your shoulders? Well, I guess, talking to your clients is more important than planning a company-wide retreat in Bali (Michael, if you are reading this - there is nothing wrong about planning a retreat in Bali).

Analyze, review, and learn

Analyzing previous issues and changes is one of the most efficient ways to get better.

A regular team retrospective is a must if you want to make sure that there is a progress in place.

While the support job does not sound like an agile environment, you may still borrow rituals from Scrum or Kanban.

We have learned that weekly plannings work best for setting short-term goals related to our support objectives and help the team to stay synced.

At the same time, a quick retrospective and demo every second week helps us to look back on our progress and review interesting cases.

Offer multichannel support

There are people who prefer Facebook over email and contact form over the support portal.

Of course, your wish is to move them through your customer care pipeline but you can not force them.

It makes no sense to ask your customer to open a support ticket just to copy/paste text form their tweet or comment.

If you believe that the problem can be answered right away and does not involve any sensitive data - just do it. Both, your support team and clients, will spend less time on resolving the issue and avoid bureaucratic loop.

Give ownership

Every team should own resources within their scope of competence.

At Visual Composer, we decided to completely rebuild our help center while putting the support team in the very center of the process.

Who else can know better what your customers are constantly looking for? From design to initial structure and content - all was managed and build by our support team members.

The results are on the plate. The support team takes a full responsibility for the help center and constantly manage (update) content of the help center.

It is their owned media they are proud of and it is their tool that help them while working with our clients.

Support is not a ping pong game

WordPress is an ecosystem so this is rarely the case when your theme or plugin is the only thing installed on your customers' site.

Have you ever experienced the case when support is telling you that another plugin or hosting is causing the issue?

As a customer, I hate myself being ping ponged across different software vendors. I just want my problem to be fixed.

While you can not avoid that completely, it is always a good idea to look a bit deeper. Get in touch with other WordPress businesses, establish relationships, do an additional investigation.

It usually takes few minutes to write an email to our friends and partners from the WordPress space to make things moving forward.

Set objectives and key results (OKRs)

You may have awesome improvements, but without proper metrics in place you will miss the point. Measuring your success (or failure) is equally important.

In the support team, we stick to quarterly OKRs (objectives and key results) to help us track our success.

A good OKR tells you what you should focus on and motivates your team. The trick is to make sure that objectives are coming from the team rather than management.

As we define our objectives, we focus primarily on two things - customers and team.

A customer-oriented objective is all about satisfying the needs of our clients and the community.

The team-oriented objective is focused on making our support team happy. Happy people achieve great results - never underestimate it.

Conclusions

Changing processes comes at a cost and you will make mistakes along the way. We experimented a lot and, trust me, not everything worked out the way we wanted.

But, as Thomas Andrew Parker said, it don't matter if you do ten stupid things, as long as you do one smart one.

I gave you ten things so you'll have to figure another one on your own.

On a serious note, not everything from the list may work for your business but you'll never know unless you try.

As a web creator, you want to ensure that your client sites stay in shape long after you deliver the project.

Whether there is a plan to add the site to your portfolio or reduce the time your spend on maintenance - you want to avoid unwanted changes.

I've been a web designer for 10 years and can surely relate to that. In fact, client changes have always been one of my strongest fears.

It is much preferable to spend your time working on a new exciting project rather than fixing what should not have been broken.

To avoid issues, web developers tend to restrict access to certain parts of the site. Some are suspicious about WordPress since it gives lots of freedom.

But the cherry on top is page builders.

WordPress page builders give enormous flexibility to manipulate layouts - is it the default Gutenberg editor or a power tool like Visual Composer.

As a web creator, you can design anything - as a client, you can break it.

To deal with the hassle, I want to share three things that satisfy my “freelancer” needs and may help your agency to reduce risks and save time.

User role management

To build a decent website, we choose powerful tools with options tailored for professionals rather than beginners.

WordPress page builders allow web creators to design custom headers, footers, post templates and even incorporate custom CSS.

In fact, based on our research, up to 45% of all Visual Composer users love to use custom CSS in their projects.

These are essential things for every web developer but can be harmful in the hands of your clients.

What I love to do is disable advanced features for my clients which results in benefits for all of us.
From the agency's point of view, you are sure that your clients will not interfere with advanced features like post templates or page options.

As for the client, he/she will receive a simpler interface to manage the content.

We all know that there is a learning curve for every page builder - no matter what ads are telling you.

As a pro, you will get the basics in an hour and become a power user in a week. As a client, you may need days to cover the basics.

Plus, you can always enable features back or use role manager as your onboarding strategy.

The role manager has proven to be a very effective instrument for me and I highly recommend it to all web creators.

WordPress admin panel

Same as for the page builder, your WordPress admin panel could require a facelift.

And by facelift, I mean, it is worth reducing the number of sections available to users other than the Administrator.

To me, the WordPress admin panel has always been bloated when it comes to an average user. You, as a web creator, are in charge of setting the correct permalink structure, managing plugins, working with the Appearance, and so on.

All these options can be hidden from other users to lower the barrier.

While there is no specific favorite on my list, plugins like User Role Editor will do the job.

Last, but not least, sometimes it is worth considering removing the admin bar as well. Just to make things cleaner.

While there is surely a plugin for that, I would go with a simple code snippet to avoid bloating my clients' sites with micro plugins. All you have to do is add this small code snippet:

add_filter( 'show_admin_bar', '__return_false' );

Element and layout locking

Any page you make consists of the layout and content. The content management process is a process when a person interacts with the content to modify it to their liking.

But what if you can modify the layout as well? The border between layout and content disappears and your clients may try to interfere with your layout.

To avoid such a scenario, I use the element lock feature that allows literally locking any element, row, or section of your page to make it accessible only by the admin.

Though, I leave only essential elements that require constant updates open. Things like paragraphs and images are still accessible to the client while styled rows are out of the content management scope.

Just like with the role manager, clients simply don't have access to certain parts of the page. The number of controls is reduced and navigation becomes easier.

To get the most out of it, I lock all elements on the page and then unlock the ones I want clients to edit. Usually, there are more elements to lock than to leave unlocked.

It will require some time, but this is how you can get 100% safe when it comes to handling the project over to your client.

Outro

Does setting up user permissions and locking down elements sound like a lot of work to do?

Yes.

Most likely, you will have to spend several hours configuring settings and locking layouts.
Nevertheless, a web creator spends up to 10 hours weekly fixing bugs (roughly 25% of all your time). And we know - fixing bugs means stealing time from development.

While the user role manager and element lock may not solve all the problems, they can help to reduce the time you spend on unwanted maintenance.

The time that is critical for your agency's growth and success.

As with everything, you will start slower and have to wait for results to come. But, I can promise you one thing - your life get easier.