If you are looking to improve the quality of your website and offer a superior user experience, then you are likely looking to improve SEO by whatever technologies are available to accomplish that goal. Google has been pushing out user-centric improvements — eliminating keyword stuffing, making page load time a ranking factor, and so on — meant to make navigating your website easier and improve SEO.
Core Web Vitals (CWV) are another step in that direction offering quantitative performance metrics that measure qualitative user experiences on your website. CWV are an important set of page load signals that measure how “users perceive” the experience of interacting with your site beyond its informational value on both desktop and mobile devices.
These benchmarks are now part of Uptrends’ Full Page Check monitors, giving you a full overview of your web page performance and user experience. Just recently, Uptrends went a step further announcing the general availability of CWV metrics for Uptrends‘ Transaction Monitors. But just what exactly are CWV metrics, how do they affect SEO scores, and how does Uptrends provide benefit by incorporating these features in its monitoring types? Let’s take a look.
Core Web Vitals 101
Google Core Web Vitals are a distinct set of metrics that provide a measurable representation of real-world user experiences. The current set of CWVs focuses on three metrics directly related to the overall user experience — page loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.
The three main CVW metrics, and their respective thresholds established by Google, are described as follows:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
- First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have a FID of 100 milliseconds or less.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of 0.1. or less.
Google believes that Core Web Vitals are critical positive user web experiences. As such, Uptrends now also supports showing CWV metrics for your transactions. You can find the additional metrics included in the transaction waterfall, in steps for which a waterfall has been enabled. To enable the extra metrics for your transaction monitoring, select Chrome with extra metrics from the Browser type drop-down in the Advanced tab in the monitor settings. At the time of this writing, this feature is only available for Uptrends’ Business and Enterprise accounts.
Transaction monitoring tools assessing Core Web Vitals compliance can consider a page passing if it meets the recommended targets at the 75th percentile for all three of the described metrics. In addition to the main three CWVs, Uptrends transaction monitors also return data on: Request Start, Time to First Byte, and DOM Interactive metrics.
Why CWV is so important
Ranking high for SEO is the name of the game for any organization with an online presence regardless of whether they are engaged in commerce, government, or academia. SEO score is a measure of how well the user-facing and technical aspects of your site contribute to search engine optimization, and ultimately, higher rankings and organic traffic.
Page experience signals, such as Core Web Vitals, are a direct organic ranking factor for SEO. Uptrends Transaction Monitoring, also known as web application monitoring, is used to check the correct functioning of user interactions on your website. These interactions range from a simple login, or all the entire sequence of steps needed to purchase a product in your online shop.
The wrap-up
The trajectory for online activity, whether for commercial or informational purposes, favors greater reliance on the ability to offer better user experiences. None of that is going away in the near future. Transaction monitoring is part of that process to improve page performance.
Transaction Monitors, or Web Application Monitors, test your crucial user interactions for function and performance on regularly scheduled intervals. Moreover, tracking CWV is essential for better overall page rankings and for shedding light onto the quality of end-user experience when interacting with your website. Transaction Monitoring is so important, we actually have an entire course on the topic.
If you would like to learn more about Uptrends Transaction Monitoring or Core Web Vitals, why not schedule a demo or try us free for 30 days?
