Today, we will discuss tools that help you measure Core Web Vitals. Before starting, we would like to introduce you to Core Web Vitals and then talk about the three metrics offered by Google. These are the Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and First Input Delay. Then, we will give you various tools for tracking the Google Core Web Vitals test of your site. Let’s start!
What Are Core Web Vitals?
If your industry, products or services, target audience, customers, and sales are closely related to the online world, a website, and its speed, you need to know what Core Web Vitals are. Learn how to speed up your eCommerce website.
Core Web Vitals allow you to understand how your web pages perform based on data. They measure your website performance and speed so that you can appreciate the experience offered to users in terms of performance.
In May 2020, Google announced a new update that includes new Google search metrics website owners should pay attention to when optimizing user experience. We can classify these metrics into three categories.
- 1) Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – a metric that tracks and evaluates how long it takes the page’s most oversized content item to appear to visitors. The ideal time is less than 2.5 seconds.
- 2) Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – a metric that tracks and measures the visual stability of web pages.
- 3) First Input Delay (FID) – a metric that tracks how long it takes for a web page to start processing the first user interaction on the site.
It is critical to optimize these three metrics to improve your website’s user experience and understand its overall responsiveness.
How to Measure Core Web Vitals
Let’s talk about what kind of tools you can use to measure Core Web Vitals Google after the new update announcement in May 2020.
You can analyze Core Web Vitals using the following:
- Google Search Console
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Google Chrome DevTools
- Google Chrome UX Report
- Google Lighthouse
Search Console
What is Google Search Console, though? Search Console is the most commonly used tool for measuring the core vitals of your site in a lab environment. This popular tool allows you to access information about your entire website instead of just one page. To clarify, it offers a Google web vitals report to help you evaluate your web pages and their performance across the entire site. So, you will be able to analyze and identify improvement points and issues across web pages, if any.
The URLs of web pages are grouped based on their status, like poor, needs improvement, and good.
Note: You need to have a verified Google Search Console account to use this tool.
PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights, or PSI for short, is another leading tool in a website’s performance analysis. Also, this tool’s best side is getting performance reports for web and mobile devices.
PageSpeed Insights shows you a range of lab data. For example, the Speed Index shows you how fastly the contents on a page are visibly populated, and Time to Interact shows the amount of time it takes for the page to become fully interactive.
Chrome DevTools
Another tool is Chrome DevTools helps you track and core measure the web core vitals metrics; site owners and developers find out and fix visual instability issues and layout shifts on a web page, if any.
Chrome UX Report
The Chrome UX report is another essential tool based on actual user experience data from millions of sites. Thanks to this tool, it is possible for website owners and developers to understand how real user experiences perform both on their websites and against their competitors’ websites.
Lighthouse
With the updates, Lighthouse provides additional audits and new metrics that give you information for optimizing user experience. Also, you can improve your site based on specific recommendations of the tool offers since Lighthouse offers lab data of the metrics; you will be able to enhance the experience of your website and visitors easily. Learn how to use Lighthouse Report to optimize your page.
Conclusion
To sum up, Core Web Vitals significantly impact your website’s user experience. That’s why it is essential to track and analyze them. In today’s guide, we’ve discussed various Google Vitals tools that allow you to measure the Core Web Vitals of your entire site. These are Search Console, PageSpeed Insight, Chrome UX Report, DevTool, and Lighthouse. You can pick one of them or use multiple ones simultaneously to improve your website performance and loading speed after detecting any visual instability issues and layout shifts. That’s all for today!