If you want to check the performance of your webshop or website, these are the best free toolings you can use.
Starting from 2021, Google's Web Vitals will have an impact on your Google ranking scores. Now is a great time to analyze your own position, and that of your competitors. Maybe because you really want to address the pagespeed of Core Web Vitals of your webshop, or maybe just for fun!
Google's Pagespeed Toolings
Considering it is Google who is deploying the Web Vitals (and the one in charge of the SEO rankings), it's a great start to use their toolings for measuring the performance of your webshop or website:
Google PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is very easy to use. You just insert the webpage you want to test and then click on "Analyze". This could be a product detailpage, product listing page or homepage. Beside providing you with insights as tested within an isolated setup, it will also show field data, based on real user experience. This will hopefully look like the result below:
Mobile result of a Wordpress website I helped optimizing, now passing the Core Web Vitals assessment.
When CrUX doesn't have (sufficient) data for your page or origin/domain, PageSpeed Insights will still show you Lab data, complemented with opportunities and diagnostics.
Google Search Console
As part of "Enhancements", Google Search Console will inform you about the newly introduced Core Web Vitals. Once again, your site or shop has to be popular enough to be part of the 6 million websites within their data-sets.
In case of enough data and maybe some optimizing, Google Search Console's Core Web Vitals report could look like this:
- 0 poor URLs;
- 0 URLs need improvement;
- 528 good URLs.
For a retail shop, I specifically addressed the Core Web Vital metrics on mobile to eventually turn around the tables as illustrated by the line charts.
Chrome UX Dashboard
By using the Chrome UX Dashboard, you are able to look directly into historical real user metrics. This way, you are able to detect the moment of positive or negative shifts and act on it.
Where PageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console will only report on Google's three Core Web Vital metrics, you will see other metrics as well when consulting Chrome UX dashboard. The full list is as following:
- Time to First Byte (TTFB);
- First Paint (FP);
- First Contentful Paint (FCP);
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP);
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS);
- DOM Content Loaded;
- onLoad.
On top of these metrics, you will also get insights into device distribution as well as network connection distribution amongst your website or webshop visitors.
Other CrUX performance toolings
Google, of course, does not have the exclusive right to performance toolings. There are also others who can provide interesting insights:
- core-web-vitals.now.sh - For quick insights into the Web Vitals metrics of your web shop, but also those of your competitors;
- vitals-leaderbord - How does the site rank based on the 75th percentile of the Core Web Vitals experience of real users;
- Crux.run - gives pagespeed insight into trends / changes over a longer period;
- Web Vitals browser extension - this isn't using CrUX data, but will at least show you live Core Web Vitals data;
- perf-track.web.app - this is CrUX data, but CrUX data of JavaScript frameworks instead of your very own website or webshop;
- Web Vitals library - this one needs coding, but can be used to embed Core Web Vital metrics of real users within your own analytics environment.
Do you know of any other CrUX toolings? Do let me know and I'll be sure to include them when they serve another purpose compared to the ones mentioned above.
