Google has made it its mission to give you as much information about your website's performance to help you improve. The Core Web Vitals, a part of "Page Experience Signals," is a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the page. When taken together, these metrics translate into a better UX. More than that, the Core Web Vitals help you understand how Google evaluates a site and what may be causing any barriers for conversion. This guide will go over what Google’s Core Web Vitals are, how they can help you identify possible pain points your customers may be experiencing and why it is important to monitor them.
The first section covers the basics of Google’s Core Web Vitals, which includes PageSpeed Insights, Mobile Friendly Test and Structured Data Markup. The second section discusses how to use these tools in order to identify potential barriers to purchase on your website.
The third bonus section is designed for more advanced users and discusses best practices, ideas of how these tools can be used together and what other resources are available in addition to Google’s Core Web Vitals.
It is important that you monitor Google’s Core Web Vitals as they are constantly evaluating and changing what they consider a site’s performance based on their own algorithm updates.
Core Web Vitals are a set of user-centered metrics that Google uses to quantify key aspects of the user experience in the real world. The Core Web Vitals measure aspects of web usability such as load time, interactivity, and the visual stability of content on the web pages as they load.
With the Web Vitals initiative, Google’s goal was to figure out which page experience signals have the most significant impact on UX. The three metrics Google landed on as most important are the Core Web Vitals.
Google's Core Web Vitals: PageSpeed Insights, Mobile Friendly Test and Structured Data Markup.
These metrics are consistently evaluated by Google's algorithm to determine how your website is performing in terms of user experience. Every site can measure these metrics, and if yours fall within a specific threshold, you’ll likely get a ranking boost from Google.
PageSpeed Insights - How fast does my site load?
Google uses a score from 0-100 for this metric that rates the loading time of pages on your site.
Mobile Friendly Test - Is your website mobile-friendly?
This test evaluates how well a page displays on both desktop and mobile devices, as Google's algorithm favors sites that are more accessible to all users.
Structured Data Markup - Do you have structured data markup?
Google prefers websites with metadata in the form of JSON-LD or microdata to help better understand your content.
Monitoring your Google Core Web Vitals is important for a few reasons.
The first reason being that it helps you identify areas of improvement on your site and provides suggested fixes to improve performance.
The second benefit is that monitoring these metrics can give you insight into what might be impacting conversion rates, whether it’s load time or if your content is mobile-friendly.
The third and most important reason to monitor these metrics is that Google uses them as ranking factors for search engine results pages, which means better performance leads to a higher rank in the SERPs.
Google's Core Web Vitals are essential for understanding the performance of your site and how it might be impacting conversion rates.
If you see that a page has poor load time, or if your website is not mobile-friendly, this could potentially lead to lower conversions. Thankfully Google’s rankings are also based on these metrics--which means a better performance leads to higher rankings.
The next step is figuring out which of these metrics are impacting your conversion rate, and then focus on improving that metric as much as possible in order to see an increase in conversions.
Allowing you to measure and assess your website's efficiency page by page, Core Web Vitals helps you determine where you can improve.
Google provides a lot of information on the Web Vitals and what they can do for you. In order to fully understand how these metrics might be impacting your website, it’s helpful to know which ones are most important.
For example, Google's PageSpeed Insights is an easy way for users who don't have access or just don't know how to use Google's developer tools, such as Lighthouse and Web Page Test.
The Mobile Friendly test is also an important metric that ensures your website is accessible for all mobile users - not just those who have larger screens like on a tablet or laptop. Structured Data Markup is another key aspect of the Core Web Vitals that helps Google better understand your content, which can help with SEO.
Google Core Web Vital Best Practices:
The purpose of this guide is to provide an overview of the key metrics that can affect your website or SEO and how you might be able to improve them. This includes PageSpeed Insights, Mobile Friendly Test, Structured Data Markup and more.
In an ever changing world of eCommerce, Google knows that the quality of your website determines your customers’ engagement, which leads to sales. That's why we, along with our friends from JetRails, have created the ultimate guide to Google's Core Web Vitals and how you might be able to improve them on your site.
