Core Web Vitals (CWV) and PageSpeed practices

[PaulSteinbrueck]

I'm just wondering about "best practices" regarding Core Web Vitals (CWV) and PageSpeed?

My understanding is that CWV is a ranking factor by relatively minor. I've also noticed that different tools (e.g SEMRush, GTMetrics) produce different CWV scores which are also different from Google Search Console. And then there's PageSpeed, which is interrelated...

So, do you check, fix, monitor CWV or PageSpeed for your SEO clients?

If so, what tool/metric do you look at? And what is an acceptable score?

You could spend an eternity trying to improve CWV/PageSpeed, so if you do measure and fix CWV/PageSpeed you've gotta know when to stop, right?

Thanks,
Paul

 

[johnlavapie_SEO]

Hi Paul - in our agency, we always check Search Console first. If SC reports back any pages that failed - that is a top priority to fix. This way, we only check the ones that are valued by SC to begin with.

The next step is to visit your page manually. Do a visual check - is anything slow or broken that bothers you? If it bothers you, it probably bothers your users as well. So I would fix it next.

The rest - are bottom priority. John Mueller said on Mastodon that for small and local businesses, "in most cases," core web vitals work should not be at the top of their list.

That is not to say we won't optimize them. But there better things to focus on before CWV.

 

[PaulSteinbrueck]

Hi Paul - in our agency, we always check Search Console first. If SC reports back any pages that failed - that is a top priority to fix. This way, we only check the ones that are valued by SC to begin with.

The next step is to visit your page manually. Do a visual check - is anything slow or broken that bothers you? If it bothers you, it probably bothers your users as well. So I would fix it next.

The rest - are bottom priority. John Mueller said on Mastodon that for small and local businesses, "in most cases," core web vitals work should not be at the top of their list.

That is not to say we won't optimize them. But there better things to focus on before CWV.

Thanks John. A couple of follow-up questions...

1. What if after trying to fix a page that failed CWV in SC, it still fails? How much time and effort are you willing to put into trying to fix it?

2. Do you do anything to CWV or PageSpeed after that initial check? If a client changed a page and it started failing CWV in SC would you know? And would you do something about it?

 

[johnlavapie_SEO]

For #1 it’s the old it depends - have you done all the top priorities in your list i.e. content, meta info, linking, etc - if you did - I’ll exert a little bit more effort for this. Or maybe you can move on to your next priority page.

As for #2 - you should get notification from SC. But it’s also important to check SC at least once every quarter.