Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics to help site owners and developers understand as accurately as possible how visitors experience their pages. For example, whether the most important elements of your pages are loading fast enough, or how long it takes before visitors can interact with your pages.
Core Web Vitals will also be a key component in the assessment of page experience ranking factor in Google Search.
To make sure you have the most relevant info about how people experience your pages, we’re bringing Core Web Vitals metrics to Site Kit in our latest release 1.10.0 🎉
What’s new?
The new and improved Page Speed and Experience module displays the most relevant Web Vitals metrics in a simplified, easy to understand view directly on your Site Kit dashboard:
The module takes just one click to activate. For each page, it shows you:
- Lab metrics: A snapshot of how the page is performing right now, measured in tests we run to simulate a page load in a controlled environment.
- Field metrics: How real users visiting your pages in Chrome browser experienced the page over time.
- Stats about mobile and desktop: You can also flip the toggle on the top right to see how your site is doing for each.
- Link to the full PageSpeed Insights report: See detailed recommendations for making improvements.
We want to help you understand how real people experience your pages, so if there’s enough Field data available for a specific page, we’ll display the Field tab by default (you can always check the Lab data by switching to the other tab).
How can I use this to improve page speed and experience?
You can combine Web Vitals with information from other Google products you have connected via Site Kit to understand the impact of performance on your pages and what to prioritise. Here are just a few ideas to get you started:
- If you’re wondering whether to prioritise mobile or desktop, check your traffic distribution by device available as a dimension in Search Console — you’ll see where most of your visitors are coming from.
- Check how the current page performance affects how people experience your page. Metrics like average time on page or bounce rate in Google Analytics can help you get a better understanding.
- If you have specific goals for this page (for example, visitors play a video, complete a form, click a button, etc), you can check the conversion rate for this goal. A low conversion rate could mean people are leaving the site because it was too slow, didn’t load as expected, etc.
- Go through the detailed PageSpeed Insights report linked from the Site Kit module and prioritize a few opportunities to fix. In some cases, there are also WordPress-specific recommendations.
- Once you’ve made fixes, you can use the Lab data to check immediately if the fixes had any effect (since Lab data is calculated fresh for that particular moment). Field data, on the other hand, is calculated over time and might take a while to reflect the improvements.
If you have questions about the new module, you can always find us on the forum.