This article was sponsored by DebugBear. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the sponsor.
What performance metrics actually affect my visibility on Google?
How do I know which pages to fix first?
How well does my site actually work?
In this article, you’ll learn how to create an industry ranking dashboard to benchmark your success and identify high-impact improvement opportunities.
How Google Measures Web Performance and User Experience
Web performance is about more than page speed.
A good user experience leads to higher conversion rates and boosts both Google search rankings and AI Overview visibility.
Although a slow website will cause visitors to bounce, the experience they have once your page loads also plays an important role in your website’s ability to achieve your business goals.
Let’s look at some of the factors that impact user experience and what they mean about how visitors perceive your website.
The Three Essential Web Elements That Affect Your Google Rankings
Google Web Vitals Core Metrics focus on three aspects of performance:
- Page loading speed: measured by the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
- Responsiveness to user interactions: measured by Interaction with the following paint (INP).
- Visual stability: measured by Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
To pass the Core Web Vitals assessment and get an increase in SERP visibility, you need to deliver a good experience on these metrics.
Google has published thresholds define what constitutes a good user experience. Try to stay within these thresholds for at least 75% of visits to get the most SEO benefits.
How response time affects whether visitors stay and explore
A fast website also impacts how users interact with your content. Delays discourage users from fully exploring your website. If you sell products online, visitors may never discover the product that solves their problem. Or, for a media company, delays can result in fewer page views and ad impressions.
Usability researcher Jakob Nielsen defined a model of different response time thresholds and their impact on user behavior:
- 0.1 seconds: Direct access to content that feels instantaneous.
- 1 second: free navigation without distraction.
- 10 seconds: loss of attention which leads to user disengagement.
To maximize conversions, don’t just grab users’ attention, but make it easy and enjoyable for visitors exploring your website.
How to Check Real Users’ Web Essentials for Your Website
How do you know what the visitor experience is really like on competing websites?
Google publishes this data in the Chrome User Experience Report (Node).
This data is collected from real Chrome users who are logged in to their Google account and have opted in to analytics reports.
Step 1: Search any domain in PageSpeed Insights
You can use a tool like Page Speed Information or that of DebugBear Core Web Vitals Test to check the CrUX metrics of your own website and your competitors.
These tools also give you insight into what you can do to improve your scores by analyzing the resources loaded on your website and their impact on page speed.
Beyond the three Core Web Vitals metrics, Google provides additional CrUX data to help identify the root cause of performance issues. Concretely, you can:
- Break down page load time into server response time and image load time.
- Find out how much latency a typical visitor’s network connection adds.
- Check if the forward/backward navigation is instantaneous or triggers a full page reload.
Step 2: Create an industry ranking dashboard for mobile and desktop separately
You can use Google’s publicly available performance data to create an industry ranking.
- Enter your website URL in the page speed test.
- Record your Core Web Vitals metric values.
- Track the percentage of visitors who have a good experience for each metric.
- Switch between mobile and desktop data and check stats for both.
DebugBear makes it easy automatically retrieve this data and set up a dashboard that stays up to date. In addition to current performance scores, you can also view historical data.
Enter your own website and a list of competing domains to start analyzing industry rankings and trends.
The CrUX Dashboard makes it easy to show clients the impact of changes to their websites on Core Web Vitals, or see which are the fastest and slowest websites in your industry. Be sure to check the visitor experience on mobile and desktop devices.
You can view performance data for different device types and check both website-wide data as well as specific URLs.
Step 3: Repeat for your top 3-5 competitor URLs
Now run a test on your website and another on a competitor’s website.
Compare results side by side to identify areas where your competitors are outperforming you. This provides a strong visual demonstration of why visitors might prefer a competing website to yours. Or, if you’re a leader in your category, you can demonstrate the impact of your team’s efforts.
- Make a list of competing websites.
- Check the Core Web Vitals data for each of them.
- Identify top performers for each metric.
If you prefer to pull all of this automatically and track changes over time, DebugBear does it all in one dashboard.
Step 4: Create a Dashboard to Visually Compare Websites
Metrics are a great way to track performance over time and see how you rank in your industry. But it’s not the most convincing way to explain to your team or your client how poor performance hurts the user experience.
At DebugBear, we have compiled a number of predefined sector dashboards in categories such as news, AI and travel.
Each dashboard displays a ranking of the best performing websites in the category, along with trend data showing whether they are getting faster or slower.
If you run a website speed test, you will be able to see how your website loads visually, using a film rendering or video recording. This really shows that visitors are waiting for content to appear before they can interact with your website.
Outperform your competitors with comprehensive performance insights
Web performance is an important aspect of the visitor experience on your website. To make your website fast, you need to know which pages are slow, what’s slowing it down, and how to fix it.
DebuggingBear can help you with all of this by providing three sources of performance data on a single platform:
- Synthetic monitoring: Run scheduled performance tests with detailed reporting.
- CrUX Data: Analyze and monitor data that impacts Google rankings.
- Real user monitoring: Track visitor experience in real time and debug slow interactions.
Continuous monitoring ensures that you will be notified when new issues arise. And in the event of a regression, you’ll be able to view a detailed before/after comparison to see what change to your website impacted your metrics.
Analyze your website to identify slow pages so you can focus your work where it matters most. You can also see how many of your pages are affected by specific performance issues, so you can focus on high-impact fixes. This also works for the accessibility and SEO checks included with Google’s Lighthouse tool.
To create a strong performance culture in your organization, you need to be able to clearly communicate user experience issues and explain why they are important. With DebugBear, you can correlate real user performance data with session duration and conversion rates, to see how a faster website delivers real business values.
Sign up for a free trial to start monitoring web performance with DebugBear, see where you stack up against your competitors and start delivering a better user experience.
Image credits
Featured image: Image from Shutterstock. Used with permission.
In-Post Images: Images from DebugBear. Used with permission.
