Passing The Core Web Vitals: A Guide To Measuring User Experience

Passing The Core Web Vitals: A Guide To Measuring User Experience

Google defined a set of metrics for site owners focusing on optimizing page experience.

Core Web Vitals metrics are part of Google’s page experience factors that all websites should strive to meet. It measures real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the page. Site owners are highly recommended to achieve good Core Web Vitals for success with Search and to make sure a great user experience generally. This, along with other page experience aspects, aligns with what the core ranking systems seem to reward.

AI revolutionizing core web vitals optimization

Initially optimizing website performance meant manually tweaking code and hoping for the best. However, AI has now completely changed the game, and the numbers back this up: 72% of companies are already using AI tools for Core Web Vitals optimization. Navigation AI is actually not your typical optimization tool, but it actually learns how your specific users browse your site and preloads pages before they even click.

About Core Web Vitals Scores

Google has recommended that site owners have CWV metrics under the ‘good’ threshold as specified by the largest contentful paint (LCP) good at =<2500ms and poor >4000ms, interaction to next paint (INP) good =<2000ms and poor >500mx, and cumulative layout shift good at equal and less than 1 and more than 0.25.

How Google Measures Core Web Vitals

Core web vitals can be measured using free tools, including PageSpeed Insights, Web vitals Extension, Lighthouse, CrUX Dashboard, Search Console, web-vitals.js and GA4.

PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights enables you to measure Core Web Vitals with both lab and field data included in reports. While the field section of the report displays data from simulated devices using a single device, the latter section offers data collection from actual users’ devices in all fields and various network circumstances. There may not be enough historical data from field data to display a report if your pages are new or receving little views. If available, the average field score for the whole websites will be used as a backup; if not, then no data would be displayed. You will see a list of suggestions for raising you scored underneath when you run reports. To discover how to use PageSpeed Insights report how to used PageSpeed Insight reports, you may read the guide.

Web Vitals Extension

Web Vitals extension is a companion tool to the nascent Web Vitals program with the goal of providing developers with a convenient way to discover how their local metrics perform. Since, then extension has been a part of the recommended Core Web Vitals tooling workflow, and it’s been used by nearly 200,000 developers.

Lighthouse

Lighthouse is an opensource, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. It is found in the Chrome DevTools suite of debugging tools and run it against any web page, public or requiring authentication. Lighthouse is also found in PageSpeed Insights, CI and WebPage Test. Lighthouse 7.x includes new features like element screenshots, for easier visual inspection of parts of your UI impacting user-experience metrics.

The Core Web Vitals measures, like Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and Total Blocking Time (a lab proxy for First Input Delay), can be artificially measured by Lighthouse. These measurements show interaction readiness, loading, and layout stability. There are additional indicators, like First Contentful Paint, which would be emphasized in the next Core Web Vitals.  

CrUX Dashboard

The CrUX Dashboard is a Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) dashboard that links to the raw origin-level CrUX data on BigQuery and the visualizes the data, eliminating the need for users of the dashboard to write any queries or generate any charts.

To see the whole picture for a website with thousands of URLs, further What percentages of URLs have ‘good’ scores or scores from a few months ago to compare against? This is where Google’s CrUX free Looker Studio dashboard helps. You can check segments and see historical data. Simply copy and paste your domain into the CrUX dashboard launcher. The, enjoy reports for free. For instance report for Search Engine Journal, in case you need to explore a real dashboard where you can find much more besides the CWV metrics. Falling short of CWV ‘good’ scores, but the data shows you are meeting all thresholds, it may be because your visitors have a bad connection.

Connection distribution report is highly valuable, helping you understand if your poor performance is due to network issues. Unfortunately, the dashboard does not give you a breakdown of CWV metrics by country, but there is a free tool, treo.sh, which you can use to check performance metrics by geos.

Search Console

Google Search Console is a free service Google offers to website owners, providing insights on how much Google search traffic your websites get, what pages are showing up in Google, and what you can do to optimize your website. Since the Page Experience Update in 2021, Google has used the Core Web Vitals metrics as a ranking factor.

Web-Vitals.JS and GA4

Web-vitals.js is an open-source library that accurately measures CWV metrics the same way Chrome or PageSpeed Insights does. The web vitals extension actually uses the library for reporting and logging. However, integrating it with Google Analytics 4 to get a detailed performance report at scale on a website with many pages.

What About Other Valuable Metrics?

Even while the Core Web Vitals are crucial, there are other page experience metrics that need attention. Important components of page experience ranking considerations include making sure your website is mobile-friendly, uses HTTPS, stays unique from other websites, and avoids invasive interstitials. Thus, considering it not just as a ranking component but also from a user-centric perspective.

From the standpoint of conversions, for instance, a slow e-commerce website may force potential buyers to leave, which would result in lost income