As more people spend time online because of COVID-19, it is more important than ever for businesses to improve their websites to keep up with digital demand and interest.

Google recently has been helping struggling companies adjust to this surge in web traffic by releasing numerous updates. These include banners for websites with announcements and augmenting shopping feeds with free listings, which can help businesses that need fixes in specific areas.

However, on May 5, Google released arguably the most helpful tool of all during this pandemic: Web Vitals. According to our Technical Manager Ray Carboni, this tool can help, “speed up page load speeds, improve page performance, and identify gaps in large payloads of scripts, files, and more”. In short, the program looks at fixing important aspects of websites that can make or break a company.

Read on to discover why you should use Web Vitals to succeed in digital marketing and the overall business arena.

Loading, Interactivity, and Visual Stability

Web Vitals has listed the three most important metrics of 2020 that it measures as loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. These components can make or break your website’s success regarding leads or sales for multiple reasons:

  • User Experience – Many users interacting with a page lose interest and abandon pages that do not load quickly, are slow to respond, and have unstable elements (buttons, links, etc). You can learn more about this in our blog about SEO and UX.
  • PPC Metrics: If you are using paid advertising, certain website attributes, especially your landing page experience, can be detrimental to ad cost, the rate that searchers click ads, and more.
  • SEO Success: Page speed and structure problems are two major factors that can hurt your website rankings on Google. These can be the qualities that push your website off of the first result page, making it impossible to find.

Web Vitals can quickly help you diagnose problems related to these three crucial aspects, saving you time and money.

Measuring Vitals

The two ways you can measure an existing site’s speed, interactivity, and visual stability are through Web Vital’s library and through an extension. Why you should choose a specific one depends on what you want to accomplish.

Extension

For finding problems on your website, you should use the Web Vitals Chrome extension. This will help you judge the overall performance of your site, and also identify if certain pages have issues. It can also be used to examine competition and narrow down which businesses are a true threat.

Library

If you want to fix problems with one of the three vitals, Web Vital’s library is your next stop. This is a great tool for developers and those familiar with Javascript. You can inspect sections of Javascript by themselves to troubleshoot, saving time by narrowing down specific problem areas.

Lab Testing

If you haven’t published your website and want to analyze vitals, there is a lab area for testing elements. It is much easier to fix problems on websites before they are published versus having to shut things down for maintenance.

Note: interactivity cannot be measured during testing because there is no visitor input. However, this is replaced with a proxy that is almost exactly the same. So you can still see whether your site will provide a user-centric outcome.

Websites – The Ultimate Building Block

In the end, if you have phenomenal advertising and great services or products, but a slow, unstable website, none of that will matter. For the sake of remaining profitable and successful, it is important to maintain the “vitals” of your website to keep it running well. Web Vitals can help you accomplish this.

If your website is suffering and you need a technical SEO audit or general digital marketing assistance, feel free to contact WTM Digital through our website, or give us a call today!