Only 24% is passing the Core Web Vitals. This means your shop has the chance to not only get some highlighting in the search results, but also outperform your closest competitors. Let's dive into some numbers and toolings.
This post was created as part of a Dutch Kinsta webinar. They invited me to talk about Core Web Vitals and other pagespeed tips and best practices as part of Black Friday preparation. But let's start with some numbers.
Core Web Vitals assessment
Around 24% percent of almost 8 million domain names is passing Core Web Vitals. This is illustrated via the purple line in the chart below. Over time, there was a minor drop in the amount of domains passing the Core Web Vitals assessment around November 2019.
Core Web Vitals metrics
Just to be sure, let's start with a short introduction of the Core Web Vitals metrics:
- LCP is standing for Largest Contentful Paint;
- FID means First Input Delay;
- CLS is about Cumulative Layout Shifts.
Real user data
Google is saving real user data to their CrUX reports. This contains data of 8 million origins, meaning individual domains. This chart, coming directly from Google UX report, is showing the average Core Web Vitals hygiene.
When it comes to the individual Core Web Vitals metrics, the percentage of origins passing each individual metric as depicted in the chart are as following:
- Last August, 47.1% had a good LCP, while being 47.0% in October;
- This was 88.2% for the FID metric, which dropped to 86.9% in October;
- And the CLS was 57.1%, dropping to a 52.3% in October;
- This means that the total amount of websites passing the Core Web Vitals dropped from 24.9%.
Numbers are impacted by the growth of the amount of origins that are part of CrUX, as well as the way Google is measuring the individual metrics, for example CLS. Or rather changed the way it is measuring CLS.
Comparing CWV with your competition
Obviously, your website of webshop needs sufficient visitors to get public data in the first place. If it does, you'll be seeing it in for example Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights, for free!
As this is public data, you can even compare your own website or webshop with your competition, to check if you are doing a better job. Luckily, others already created toolings to do this for you.
Free toolings to check your competition
For example, vitals-leaderbord is a tooling that I like to use to get customers involved.
Addy Osmani has build a compare tool as well with a bit of VueJS and hosted on netlify: Check out his Chrome UX Report Compare Tool.
Another nice tooling that I discovered is defaced.dev. You can then just search for relevant keywords and directly see how closest search result competitors are doing. Core Web Vitals metrics are directly shown next to each search result. This isn't as low-key as the vitals leaderbord as it requires:
- Chrome, as it is created as a Chrome extension;
- A Google API key.
Own Core Web Vitals results
Using the leaderbord tooling resulted in the following comparisons and outcomes, being the fastest in both cases.
Wiechers Wonen
Within wiecherswonen.nl, CLS was a bottleneck. After addressing CLS, wiecherswonen.nl became the overall number 1 as well as number one website within 3 of 4 individual metrics.
Beekhuis Yachtbrokers
The previous website of beekhuisyachtbrokers.com suffered from high LCP metrics. Litterally no one had a good LCP experience. We managed to turn things around drastically. In one of my LinkedIn posts, you can see how things turned around over a period of 28 days after doing a platform migration.
The outcome is creating the best user experience on all four individual metrics. We even managed to be doing 32.7% better than the number two competitor when it come to the LCP metric.
Core Web Vitals history
Want to see how your competitors score on the Core Web Vitals over the last 6 months? Then you can use the Core Web Vitals history checker by RUMvision. This way, you can see if your competitors have made improvements on their Core Web Vitals and other pagespeed metrics over the last few months. Would you rather have a score? Then check out the Core Web Vitals score tool.
