Core Web Vitals & Website Performance Consultancy

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Fun fact, the target load for a user who has already been on one of your pages is around 2 seconds which is roughly the time it takes the average person to turn a page in a book.
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What is Core Web Vitals and Performance Consultancy and what is involved?

Google likes to say that Core Web Vitals is not a ranking factor and therefore improving your scoring will not result in an improvement to your rankings. The sub-text here is that whilst it may not be a factor in the sense of pass means improvement and fail means drop, it does indirectly improve metrics which 100% are. Through looking over your website’s performance I can help improve bounce rate, pages per session and general user experience through removing slowness, jank and rage clicks.
Performance audit

Performance audit

The first step is to get an understanding of how you’re performing and where are the most pertinent areas to focus on. Auditing is done using both synthetic testing (point and shoot tools) and user data (often called RUM data – with RUM standing for Real User Measurement). I do the checks, distil the solutions into tickets and present back to you what needs doing and what is the expected upside.
Performance budgets and Engineer training

Performance budgets and Engineer training

A blind spot for most that engage in performance and Core Web Vitals improvements is that you need to consider how to keep it performant. I help brands with future projects by providing training for the engineering teams and helping with the creation of performance budgets – which allow for automated testing as part of CI/CD piplines.
Business casing

Business casing

One of the biggest wins associated with improving your websites performance is that it can have a meaningful impact on your bottom line. The logic goes that by not interrupting the user’s flow they are more likely to complete their intended action, so the more performant the website the better conversion. The best part of this however is that it’s easily measurable and can be modelled so to pitch upsides over tickets.

How the Process Works

Step 1

A deep-dive audit

Performance audits are helpful for two reasons, they firstly allow me to find and quantify issues that are presently hurting your site’s performance. Secondly, understanding what is causing a disruption and having data related to the amount of disruption being caused by issues, means I can present back to the business the expected improvements as part of the work – both financially and related to SEO.
Step 2

A proposal for the works (optional)

Using the data from the audits I can produce modelling to indicate what is the expected improvement to trading and user behaviour. This is very popular with decision makers and engineers, both of which enjoy knowing that the work is highly likely to be hugely impactful to the business and users.
Step 3

Tickets and quality assurance

All of my recommendations are distilled into tickets which can be used by engineers and are specific to your website. Once worked on, I also can support with both making sure it has been implemented as expected and recording the upside from the work using synthetic testing.
Step 4

Training and tooling setup

Once the work is done I’m keen to keep your site working fast and without lag. At this point I work with your engineers and product teams to establish best practices (training) and to introduce systems and budgets so to prevent slowness creeping back onto your website.
Have a question about the process?
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FAQ's

There's not much mention of SEO in the above, how comes?
The conventional wisdom here is that if users enjoy being on your website, meander around and complete whatever it is that they came to do – then search engines will favour you in their results. Whether that’s due to bounce rate, pogo-sticking, scroll depth or a long list of other considerations is largely academic, what’s important is that the more people who access and accomplish their task using your website the less you’ll have to worry about in terms of SEO.
How do I know if my site is slow?

Firstly it’s worth clarifying that your website can be slow to load and slow in terms of interactivity (I.e. when you click on a button nothing happens).

Whilst tools exist that I can share which list how well you score on a scale of 1 – 100 or A – F, a more practical and simpler test is simply to disconnect from wifi on your phone and click around your website. If the pages are taking a long time to finish loading, things randomly shift around and when you click on something it takes a noticeably long time for anything to happen – then it’s probably slow enough to warrant having a conversation.

The aim here is to keep people in the flow of what they’re doing, a button not doing anything when I click on it creates rage clicks and is usually a good reason for someone to go back to a search engine and try someone else.

What's the difference between lab testing and RUM testing?

Lab testing, sometimes called synthetic testing, refers to using tools which try to emulate the experiences of users and in doing so measures and scores what they expect will be your scores. Lab testing is integral for measuring whilst working on improvements, it allows engineers to see what the expected difference in timing will be once released to the website.

RUM, or Real User Measurement, testing is when you proactively measure users experiences when using your website. The benefit here is that it is 1st party data, which means it’s more dependable and carries no erroneous assumptions.

A fun bit of trivia is that Google actually provides you with RUM data by discreetly measuring users experiences in the chrome browser. This means that even if you have not been actively measuring your users interactions you can gather some data from Chrome.

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