What are the Core Web Vitals?
When we talk about Core Web Vitals, we refer to the metrics and parameters that evaluate the web and user experience based on security, loading speed and responsiveness, among other important aspects for good web performance. Thanks to these core web vitals we can have a broad vision of the type of user experience that we have on our website.
This is intended to provide a more complete view of the type of experience users have with a website, as well as simplify the way it is measured through indices. Thus, it is essential to have an SEO professional and tools to be able to optimize these parameters in the best possible way.
Why are the Core Web Vitals so important?
Core Web Vitals help you to quickly track and understand how your website is performing. Therefore, it is crucial to know them in detail and find the right tools to measure them. This article aims to give wide view of the different types of tools that we can use to measure Web Vitals.
The main purpose of testing tools is to assess performance throughout the development cycle. As a result, you can set standards and ensure compliance before you release the application to production.
These types of tools allow you to measure metrics such as:
- Largest Happy Paint
- Cumulative Layout Shift
- First Input Delay
- Interaction to Next Paint
Tools to measure and improve Core Web Vitals
Google Pagespeed Insights
PSI includes a score at the top of the report, which summarizes the performance of the page. A score of 90 or higher is generally recommended to pass the performance review. It is the number 1 tool to measure and evaluate our Core Web Vitals. Among its many advantages, we differentiate some that are really useful for any website.
- Provides lab and field data both from desktop and mobile devices.
- Overview of field data from real users to improve UX
- Recommendations to improve the performance of the web.
Lighthouse
One of the most recommended tools to measure Core Web Vitals Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which are indications of speed and visual stability.
It analyzes your website based on performance, accessibility, best practices and some basic SEO questions. In fact, PageSpeed Insights is partially based on Lighthouse – and offers us specific recommendations to improve the site. Your score calculator is your best ally.
One thing you need to know is that you can run Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools, from the command line, as a module from here. The only thing you need to do to start enjoying its features is provide an audit URL to Lighthouse. It will perform a sequence of audits on the website and then it will create a report about the performance of the website.
Google Search Console
It is one of the best growth hacking tools, it extracts a report that allows us to analyze and identify the pages that may need improvements and/or corrections. To do this, it is based on the real data offered by Chrome UX Report. Thus, it groups URLs into three categories (good, needs improvement, poor) according to their metric type. With this tool, you will be able to know the performance of all your URLs according to Core Web Vitals. This is an incredible and very useful tool to analyze landing pages.
Web Vitals Extension
This extension that we can install in our Google Chrome browser and that allows us to analyze the Core Web Vitals metrics in real time from the desktop. Its use is recommended for developers who want to analyze the improvements that have been implemented. You just have to go to the page and click on the extension to do it.
Chrome UXReport
We finish with this Google Tool. Actually, It is not a tool itself, but the collection of public data that includes user experience information in the real world of millions of websites. This data is collected based on Chrome users who voluntarily participate in it. It’s free, but it’s also one of the hardest Core Web Vitals tools to use.
Conclusions
As one of the many factors that influence the SEO success, Having the Core web vitals under control is one of the most important ones. Google is giving a lot of prominence to the user experience, so we must adapt so that our website is optimized in order to be better positioned. At FinancialMarkets.media we are specialists in optimization of both content and user experience, we offer SEO plans for each user as well as designs adapted to the user experience.
