Google Core Web Vitals Consulting & Optimization Services

0:00Who We Are and What Core Web Vitals Consulting Is

Brendan from WP Speed Fix. I thought I'd make you a short video just to talk about our Core Web Vitals consulting services. We are a site speed optimization and technical SEO agency. Those are the two things we specialize in. Site speed optimization is basically a subset of, or part of, technical SEO, and one of the things we do, pretty much our core service, is Google Core Web Vitals consulting and optimization services. That's what we have been doing since 2020, when Core Web Vitals was released, or announced, or introduced by Google.

We're a bit different to other agencies. You're probably either watching this on YouTube or on our website. If you're on YouTube, you can click over to this page on our website, Core Web Vitals Consulting. It talks about a few things and how we operate.

0:46Why a 100 PageSpeed Score Is Not the Goal

Basically, a 100 score in Google PageSpeed Insights is not the goal of speed optimization. Passing Core Web Vitals is. The Core Web Vitals data set is the real-world speed users are experiencing when they visit your website. On every single Google Chrome browser, and all Chromium-based browsers, using the Chromium engine, which is a lot of the browsers, something like 70% of the browser market, on every page load that browser is sending data back to Google. It's sending data back on the load speed of the page.

That data set is called the Chrome User Experience Report, or CrUX, and that's the data set that is used to generate reports about site speed and Core Web Vitals metrics. If you run a test in Google PageSpeed Insights, the data at the top that says field data is coming from real users who have visited your site or that page. So the goal is not a 100 score in PageSpeed Insights. The goal is actually to pass the Core Web Vitals metrics, so get a passing grade there, or a good score across the three Core Web Vitals metrics.

1:58How Other Tools Cheat the Test and Hurt Real Speed

Commonly you'll see, we've got just a note on the page, that a lot of other agencies and tools and services will promise or guarantee a 100 score in PageSpeed Insights. The way they're able to do that is basically by cheating the test. In most cases what they are doing is not loading the full version of the page. Most commonly they delay or pause the JavaScript on the page until the user interacts with the page. So they're not loading the whole page, and that makes the speed look really good on a test like that.

In a real-world scenario, though, that can actually make the speed go backwards. When the user gets to the site and starts interacting with it, only then do things like JavaScript load: heavy third-party tracking tools, live chat tools, things like that. That actually makes their experience slower in a lot of cases, so it can make the Core Web Vitals go backwards. It's possible to have a 100 score on PageSpeed Insights and be completely failing the Core Web Vitals metrics. Keep that in mind.

It can also totally ruin your SEO. Because the page is not loading fully, when a Google crawler comes along, Google gets the same experience. It's not seeing the fully loaded page. You can test this on your own website. If speed optimization has been done on your site and you're not passing Core Web Vitals, load the page, don't interact with it, don't move the mouse, don't do anything, and just see if it fully loads on that initial page load in the browser. If it doesn't, then you've got some sort of aggressive JavaScript optimization going on where the page is not loading fully. So keep that in mind.

3:30The Three Core Web Vitals Metrics and Their Benchmarks

Core Web Vitals is also a ranking factor. If you're failing Core Web Vitals, you're likely not ranking as high as you could. We've got some information on the three Core Web Vitals metrics here, and I'll run through them very quickly. LCP, Largest Contentful Paint. This is when the user perceives the page as having been loaded. That's when the largest piece of content on the page loads. The benchmark for good is 75% or more of the visitors getting an LCP time of under 2.5 seconds. That's what a good or passing grade is.

INP is how quickly the site responds to inputs, how quickly the site visually responds to an input from the user. That needs to be under 200 milliseconds for 75% or more of the users. Then CLS, or layout shift. That's difficult to explain, but it's probably best explained by an experience you've had yourself on a page. It's kind of loading, you go to click on something, it finishes loading and now you're clicking in the wrong spot. That's layout shift. It's not a time or a score. It's a computed number, a calculated number, and it needs to be under 0.1 for 75% or more of the visitors to be in the passing grade.

4:40Why Time to First Byte Matters for Every Metric

We've also got time to first byte listed here. This is not a Core Web Vitals metric, but it does impact all the other metrics. It's how quickly your server responds to requests: the time it takes for the browser, technically, to receive the first byte from the server. If you have a bad time to first byte, all the other metrics will be bad. We just talked about LCP and our goal is under 2.5 seconds. If you have a time to first byte of 2 seconds, or 2.5 seconds, then you're immediately going to fail that LCP metric. So time to first byte is also important, although it's not a Core Web Vitals metric.

Time to first byte is affected by a lot of things: hosting quality, hosting speed, hosting load, how well, or if, you even have page caching on the site, and whether you're using more advanced techniques like edge caching, so the page is cached at the content delivery network layer, or the CDN layer. It can also be impacted by things like marketing tools. A very common problem we see is paid traffic being very slow, because there are custom query strings attached to that paid traffic that are bypassing all the speed optimization. You end up in a scenario where the most expensive visitors, the visitors you're paying for, are actually getting the slowest experience because of these marketing tools you're using. That's a very common issue as well.

6:12Our Three-Phase Consulting Approach

There are a lot of different ways we can help you. Broadly, our consulting approach is split into three parts. We audit a site, we come up with an action plan, and then we do the implementation. We can do the implementation for you, or if you have a team they can do it, or we can work with your team to do the implementation. But basically those are the three phases of our optimization work.

6:34Vital Signs Tracker: Closing the Loop Faster Than 28-Day Data

We also have a custom-built tool called Vital Signs Tracker. One problem we have with Core Web Vitals data is that it's based on an average of 28 days. If we're relying on Google's tools, we have to wait 28 days, or up to 28 days, to see how well our speed optimization work has performed or whether it's fixed problems. With Vital Signs Tracker, we're actually grabbing the same data from the Core Web Vitals data set, the CrUX Chrome User Experience Report data set, and we put it in our own database so we can do reports on it. If you go to our Products and Services menu here, you'll see Vital Signs Tracker in there. There's some information there and a walkthrough video on how it works.

Basically, we can run reports and see how we're doing on a page-by-page level. It also tracks the attribution. If something like LCP is failing, we click into these metrics and it will tell us what element was loading that's failing, whether it's an image or a video or whatever it is. It's a very powerful tool, and we've built it to shortcut the process of optimizing for Core Web Vitals. We can implement the action plan, and then with Vital Signs Tracker installed, within three, five or seven days, depending on how much traffic the site has, we have a data set there. We can see whether the site's passing or whether more action is required, or maybe there are particular pages with big fat images or something that is slow and those images need individual attention. Broadly, with Vital Signs Tracker we close the loop, turn around optimization very quickly and see all the gaps without having to rely on Google tools or Google Search Console.

8:06Getting Started: Free Site Audit and Core Web Vitals Report

In terms of getting started, there are probably two things you can do from here. We have a free site audit page here, so you can submit a site audit request. Tell us what you're looking for help with or what you're looking to achieve, and one of the team will come back to you within about one business day or so. If you're not ready for that yet, we also have a Core Web Vitals report here. You can run this report and it will work so long as you have enough traffic. To have a Core Web Vitals data set for a website, it needs to have somewhere between 50 and 100 visits per day to have enough traffic to build that data set. It's not a fixed number, because it's based on Google Chrome browsers. If you have a lot of Safari users, there might not be enough traffic from Google Chrome users to push you over that threshold.

To run this report, it takes about 60 seconds. There's no opt-in required. You can only run it on a site level. It doesn't work on a page level. Make sure you're using the primary URL of the site. If your site loads with or without www, use that in here. I'll run a report now on a site here, so I'll generate this report so you can see what it looks like. There's a video walkthrough on that page explaining how the reports work. It's a Google Data Studio report. Like I said, it takes about 60 seconds to run, sometimes a little faster than others.

9:15Reading the Report: History, Devices and Monthly Updates

You can see here's the date selector. You can see the historical data for the site. You can go back, I think, 12 months, and you can click these tabs on the left and see the historical data for the different metrics. You have the Core Web Vitals and then other metrics as well. You can also see the percentage of desktop versus mobile users that it's tracked, so you can see what's more important. For some sites desktop is more important than mobile and vice versa. You can run this report on competitor sites as well.

The report updates on the second Tuesday of each new month with new data sets. You can set this up and use it on a month-to-month basis and track your site speed. You can set up email reporting for it as well. You can do a whole bunch of stuff. If you're not ready yet for a service, there's a link here, click to generate that report. If there's anything else you need, just hit the Contact Us page on our website, or if you have any questions, post in the comments below if you're on YouTube. I think that covers everything. If you need any help, like I said, come to our website, wpspeedfix.com, and we're happy to help you out with Core Web Vitals consulting and optimization services. Cheers.