Google Core Web Vitals
Whether or not you show up as an option when someone searches for an organization or company like yours is heavily influenced by Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV). This measure of your site’s user experience (UX) will factor into where you show up in SERPs (search engine results pages), and will also give you an idea of how well your site performs for an abstract “visitor” on your site.
Optimization will help you score better on tests like this, a.k.a. “in the lab”, which many providing optimization services will present to you as proof that your site is optimized. However we take things a step further at Deepwater Pixel, by testing with real-world devices and providing on the spot evaluations of pages at your request. If you’re one of our Site Maintenance clients, we’ll even identify these pages for you during regular maintenance and fix it for you as part of the included cost of your service.
Here's what's included in CWV:
LCP
Measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the first page starts loading.
FID
Measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have a FID of 100 milliseconds or less.
CLS
Measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the first page starts loading.
How does it work?
Using a variety of tools (GTMetrix, PageSpeed Insights, Google Search Console, etc.), we evaluate and test your site’s most important pages to identify and isolate the biggest weights on your performance scores and real world speeds.
Before Optimization
After multiple attempts to optimize a site with plugins, the client was stuck with less-than-ideal scores in GTMetrix (based on Lighthouse) and was unsure how to proceed and improve performance. Desktop performance seemed to be ok, but mobile performance was suffering.
After Optimization
Deepwater Pixel ran a few tests on this page and found two heavy external requests that were contributing most to the TBT (Total Blocking Time) and LCP (Longest Contentful Paint). Removing those improved scores considerably, and shaved about 3 seconds from real world page load times on mobile devices.
But... "in the lab" scores aren't everything.
That's right. Your score matters, but it isn't the only thing that matters.
We make sure that sacrifices in the name of speed are justified, and that your website has all the features needed to deliver your value to your audience. There’s nothing worse than having a designer build the coolest pricing calculator ever for you, only to find that an optimization specialist recommend you remove it from your site entirely to achieve their precious high scores.
