Do You Track Core Web Vitals

[Kurt Steinbrueck]

Hi Everyone,

Do you track Core Web Vitals (CWV) for your SEO clients? If so, what tool(s) do you use?

I track CWV for my SEO clients using SEMRush's Site Audit tool. I like how it checks multiple pages and I can schedule it to run the audit regularly. However, some clients have very fast sites that don't have much shifting content and they will still fail the audit. I use the default mobile settings for the CWV audit which throttles the test speeds considerably.

I know Google uses real-life data for their algorithms and I'm wondering if the test results are really comparable to the real-life data Google uses or if I might be getting a bunch of false failures because the settings for the audit are too slow. So, I'm considering using another tool or seeing if I can alter the settings for the audit.

All that said, I've seen some studies where people found all 10 top results in the SERPs to have failing CWV scores. So, I'm wondering whether it's even worth the time and effort to track CWV.

Thanks.
Kurt

 

[JeffClevelandTN]

Hi Kurt, we do monitor CWV but for the most part just pay attention to what Google Search Console has to say, as none of the tools we have used seem to accurately match what GSC shows. We've tried a number of the tools and all of them are essentially emulators.

We almost exclusively develop our sites in Divi on Wordpress and have found that using WP Rocket (with some tweaks) along with a CDN pretty much solves any speed loading issues and shows immediate passing scores on tools such as SemRush and GTMetrix. For any SEO clients that we also manage/host their websites, by using WP Rocket, we don't have any issues with CWV. However, I haven't seen any issues with ranking caused with our clients when they previously had failing CWV, but we'd rather be ahead of the curve and eliminate that as a cause of ranking or drop in ranking.

 

[Kurt Steinbrueck]

Hi Kurt, we do monitor CWV but for the most part just pay attention to what Google Search Console has to say, as none of the tools we have used seem to accurately match what GSC shows. We've tried a number of the tools and all of them are essentially emulators.

We almost exclusively develop our sites in Divi on Wordpress and have found that using WP Rocket (with some tweaks) along with a CDN pretty much solves any speed loading issues and shows immediate passing scores on tools such as SemRush and GTMetrix. For any SEO clients that we also manage/host their websites, by using WP Rocket, we don't have any issues with CWV. However, I haven't seen any issues with ranking caused with our clients when they previously had failing CWV, but we'd rather be ahead of the curve and eliminate that as a cause of ranking or drop in ranking.

Thanks Jeff.

I would use GSC as well, but most of our local clients are in relatively low traffic markets and Google doesn't give a report in GSC due to not having enough data.

I did, however, set up tracking in Google Analytics. What I found is that GA indicated lower times for the individual CWV scores than what I'm getting from SEMRush. I'll have to see if there's a way to adjust SEMRush's settings so the test doesn't throttle the device/connection speeds as much and is more in line with our actual traffic.

Thanks for the heads up about WP Rocket. I'll check it out.

 

[cfazio]

Kurt,

We do, using the official script from the Google Crome dev team.

GitHub - GoogleChrome/web-vitals: Essential metrics for a healthy site.

Essential metrics for a healthy site. Contribute to GoogleChrome/web-vitals development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Measures CWV from real users (every single user on your website), and we get that data in GA4.

It even measures INP, so we are now starting to collect that data for the official release in 2024.

We also collect FCP (First Contentful Paint) data, although not a ranking web vital, we find its a good measure of how fast a website actually feels for users.

-Charles

 

[Kurt Steinbrueck]

This is great, Charles. We've set some tracking up on GA4, but this looks like it has the potential to be even better.

Thank you!!