Core Web Vitals : how to analyze the performance of your website?

The statement of your Conversion Rate Optimization and your data expertise teams is without appeal: when users visit your website, if they face a bad experience, 88% of them won’t return to your website. How to avoid it? What defines a “bad experience”? Is the content not interesting enough? Is the experience on your web pages that bad? You should check your Web Vitals to find the right conclusion.

Web Vitals? Core Web Vitals? You may have heard of both, or none of them (if so, you’ve come to the right place) but let’s get back to the start. It is no secret, these concepts have a powerful impact on your digital marketing strategies. Web Vitals are the metrics that were thought of by Google to help you analyze the performance of your website.

If you want to know how to benefit from using Google’s Core Web Vitals report, and get a better insight into the impact of those factors on your online visibility, keep reading.

Core Web Vitals: what does it mean?
Why should you care?

When you enter the different Web Vitals, you can find Core Web Vitals. In fact, Core Web Vitals are a subsection of those metrics that contains the 3 essential factors that determine whether or not your website offers a good user experience to its visitors. 

Core Web Vitals include LCP (largest contentful paint), FID (first input delay) and CLS (cumulative layout shift). But first: why does it matter to track your Core Web Vitals? 

• Among the factors that explain how your page ranks on Google SERP (search engine result page), the user experience of your webpage is essential. A page that takes too long to load will be downranked. 
  
  
• According to the 2019 Hubspot Report, 70% of consumers said that page speed impacts their willingness to buy online. If your page behaves poorly in loading time, they will probably leave it before purchasing anything. 
  
  
• Thus, the quality of their experience is essential, and this as soon as their first visit to your website since 50% of customers would switch to a new brand after one single bad experience (Hubspot, 2021). 

Let’s now take a closer look at the traditional KPIs now. 

Traditional KPIs to make the most of your website

Before digging into Core Web Vitals, let’s make sure that you are already up to date with the basics of your website optimization.  

KPIs consist of measurable performance indicators that help you track and optimize the user experience on your website. Hence, to better your website UX, you should monitor: 

• The bounce rate: percentage of users that leave your website without visiting another page. 
• The friendliness of your website with mobile devices. According to Statista, in 2020, mobile devices generated half of all website traffic globally. If your website is not mobile-friendly, you’ll lose an essential share of potential customers.
• Pages viewed per session to see if some pages are more relevant than others.
• Exit page so that you can analyze whether or not they intend to buy before leaving. 

But tracking those KPIs will probably not be enough. To tailor the best user experience possible, you should tend towards the Core Web Vitals. 

How to monitor your
Core Web Vitals?

Now that you know what Core Web Vitals are, you should be interested in keeping track of them. 

To do so, you can conduct a SEO audit to improve your rank in the search engine result page or make tests to enhance your page loading time. Some tools could help you automate the tracking process of your Core Web Vitals. For example, here is a list of tools you can use: Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insight, Chrome DevTool,… If you want to learn more about these tools, please read our article.

improve UX thanks to Core
Web Vitals... but not only

Here are the three takeaways that need to stay in your mind:

• Core Web Vitals help you better the experience of users on your page
• They allow you to optimize your page quality so that you can rank higher on the search engine result page (it is not the only factors that account for your ranking).
• To improve your SEO strategy, track the three following metrics: LCP, FID, CLS.

Why won’t you jump in? If you want some backup, don’t hesitate to call upon our agency.