Ready to start prioritizing your website performance, rank higher in Google, and deliver a better user experience? Learn how now.
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All of us have encountered websites that take an eternity to load. It doesn’t make a good first impression!
A quick website can increase traffic and entice users to explore more of what you have to offer. (Right now, see how quickly your webpage loads.)
However, after your website has been sped up for the first time, additional user experience metrics, such Interaction To Next Paint, may start to appear.
Sometimes, while you’re not looking, the hidden culprit server load slows down your website.
What can you do, then, to make your website faster and maintain its performance over time?
In This Guide
- 1.Why Is Page Speed Important In SEO?
- 2.Step 1: Run A Website Performance Test
- 3.Step 2: Set Up Website Monitoring
- 4.Step 3: Set Up Real User Monitoring
- 5.Step 4: Use Real User Data To Pinpoint Specific Performance Metrix
Why Does Page Speed Matter for SEO?
A ranking signal is page speed and how it impacts your users’ experience.
Once visitors have made the decision to visit your website, it’s critical to make sure it loads quickly and offers a satisfying user experience. Users are more inclined to browse the remainder of your website or proceed through your checkout process if they can quickly discover the information they require.
Making your website quick will therefore help you in a number of ways, including:
Improve your Google ranking to boost organic traffic.
Improve the user experience and conversion rates.
For both you and your visitors, cut costs.
Sometimes, while you’re not looking, the hidden culprit server load slows down your website.
How Page Speed Can Improve Your Google Search Results Ranking
Google gathers information about page performance from actual Chrome users and applies it as a ranking signal.
The Core Web Vitals (CWV) are three performance indicators that are examined.
The following are the core web vitals:
LCP, or Largest Contentful Paint.
Layout shift cumulative (CLS).
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) will take the place of First Input Delay (FID) as of 2024.
You will receive the most ranking boost if at least 75% of website visitors assess their experience as “good” according to Google across all three criteria.
How Can Core Web Vitals Be Verified?
You may find out if you need to optimize page experience on your website from the CWV report in Google Search Console.
What Does Each Core Web Vital Mean?
Each CWV focuses on the speed of different aspects of your website.
Your goal is for your website to be in “Good” standing for each metric.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
The LCP metric measures how quickly your website loads. Specifically, it looks at how soon after navigating to a page the biggest content element shows up, for example, a hero image or content heading.
The Largest Contentful Paint score should be 2.5 seconds or less.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
If the website layout stays steady once content first appears is measured by CLS. If there is a layout shift, it means that some page elements move around after they first appear. As a result, the user has a terrible user experience because they must adjust their position to read further or risk clicking the wrong button by accident.
The score for the cumulative layout shift should be less than 0.1. It is determined by taking into account both the amount of stuff that has moved and how far it has moved.
Step 1: Run A Website Performance Test
Want to know how quickly your website loads and receive suggestions on how to make it faster? You can evaluate your website’s performance right now and get a thorough report on how to make improvements by running a free website speed test.
Here is an illustration of a test result:
Step 2: Set Up Website Monitoring
Running a test on your website tells you how fast your website is now. But continuously monitoring your website and having historical data available means that you can:
- Get alerts when there’s a new performance issue.
- Check if performance optimizations have the expected impact.
- Compare test results on different days and understand the differences.
- Create reports that show your team and management how your site is doing.
Types Of Site Speed Monitoring
There are two main types of page speed data that you can monitor:
- Lab or synthetic data is collected on a schedule in a controlled testing environment.
- Field or real user data is collected from end users when they visit the website.
Lab data is more detailed and easier to collect, while real user data can show you how users are actually experiencing your website.
Synthetic Performance Tests: Benefits & Limitations
Scheduled lab-based page speed tests are easy to set up, provide detailed reporting, and can be configured both for your own sites and those of your competitors.
However, lab-based tests come with some limitations:
- User interactions after the initial page load aren’t measured (unless you’ve scripted them as part of the test setup).
- Scheduled tests are run with a consistent device configuration, like screen size and network connection speed. However, real users use a wide range of devices and experience varying network conditions.
- You only get data for the page URLs that you’ve set up monitoring for.
Some metrics like INP and CLS depend heavily on how the user interacts with the page after it’s loaded.
The content element responsible for the LCP metric also often varies based on the device. For a user with a large screen, the LCP element may be an image. On a small screen, the LCP element may be a heading, with the image appearing somewhere below the fold.
Real User Website Performance Monitoring: Benefits & Limitations
Collecting data from real users provides a number of advantages:
- It’s what ultimately matters to your visitors.
- Google uses real user data for rankings.
- You get data for the whole spectrum of user experiences: different browsers, devices, networks, and user behavior.
- Data can be collected for your whole website instead of for specific page URLs.
However, you need to make changes to your website to set up real user monitoring, and each test result will have less detail than a full lab-based test. Real user site speed data and scheduled performance tests each have their pros and cons, and they ultimately complement each other.
Step No 3
Set up real user monitoring in step three.
Installing an analytics snippet from the website monitoring solution of your choice on your website is required to collect data from actual users.
Pro Tip: To get started, register for a free DebugBear trial.
When your account is ready, click “Get Started” under the “RUM” option.
This will generate an embed code that you need to install on your website. You can add it to the HTML template of your website, or install it via a tag manager tool like Google Tag Manager.
Once this is set up you’ll start to see real-world Core Web Vitals experiences for your website.
You can also see where in the world users have a good experience and where your site loads more slowly.
Step 4: Use Real User Data To Pinpoint Specific Performance Metrics
If your website isn’t doing well on one of the Core Web Vitals metrics you can dive more deeply into this issue.
DebugBear provides metric-specific dashboards that show you:
- Which of your pages are fast and which are slow.
- The distribution of user experiences.
- Whether a typical user experience is fast or slow.
- How page speed has changed over time, both for the average user and for the slowest 10% of user experiences.
Knowing which page element represented the bulk of the material for various users is crucial while debugging the LCP. DebugBear displays a breakdown of these components along with the time required for it to emerge.
By doing so, you may determine which page optimizations might benefit the most amount of customers.
The same is true for INP, where you must know which page interaction caused a user interaction delay.
Finally, DebugBear can provide you with information on the relationships between metrics like bounce rate and page speed:
How Real User Monitoring Is Different From Google’s Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX)
Whether you own analytics or look at Google data, in both cases you’re working with real user metrics.
Why not just rely on the Google data exclusively?
- Google provides data that’s aggregated over a 28-day period, so after a change on your website, it takes a long time to see the effect.
- CrUX data is only available for pages that reach a minimum traffic volume.
- Google only collects data from users who are logged into their Google account in Chrome.
Step 5: Continuously Run Page Speed Tests
The DebugBear website monitoring service can run performance tests on a schedule, whether that’s hourly, daily, or weekly.
To get started, simply enter your website URL and pick a test location, test device, and monitoring schedule.
Once you’ve set up monitoring, a dashboard will tell you how your website has been doing on the CWV metrics of the last few weeks.
You can also monitor competitor sites to see how your site speed compares.
