This post was sponsored by DebugBear. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
Which performance metrics actually affect my Google visibility?
How do I find out which pages to fix first?
How well is my site actually performing?
In this article, you’ll learn how to create an industry ranking dashboard to compare your success to and identify high-impact improvement opportunities.
How Google Measures Web Performance & User Experience
Web performance means more than just page speed.
A good user experience drives higher conversion rates and strengthens both Google search rankings and AI Overview visibility.
While a slow website will lead visitors to bounce, the experience they have once your page has loaded also plays a big role in whether your website will achieve your business goals.
Let’s look at some of the factors that impact user experience and what they mean for how visitors perceive your website.
The Three Core Web Vitals That Affect Your Google Rankings
Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics focus on three aspects of performance:
- Page load speed: measured by the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
- Responsiveness to user interactions: measured by Interaction to Next Paint (INP).
- Visual stability: measured by Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
To pass the Core Web Vitals assessment and get a SERP visibility boost, you need to provide a good experience across these metrics.
Google has published thresholds defining what constitutes a good user experience. Aim to stay within these thresholds for at least 75% of visits to get the most SEO benefit.
How Response Time Affects Whether Visitors Stay & Explore
A fast website also impacts how users engage with your content. Delays discourage users from fully exploring your website. If you’re selling things online, visitors might never discover the product that solves their problem. Or for a media business delays can result in fewer page views and ad impressions.
Usability researcher Jakob Nielsen defined a three-tier model of different response time thresholds and their impact on user behavior:
- 0.1 seconds: direct access to content that feels instant.
- 1 second: free navigation without distraction.
- 10 seconds: loss of attention that causes users to disengage.
To maximize conversions, don’t just hold user attention, make it easy and enjoyable for visitors to explore your website.
How To Check Real-User Core Web Vitals For Your Website
How can you know what real visitor experience looks like on competitor websites?
Google publishes this data in the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX).
This data is collected from real Chrome users who are logged into their Google account and have opted in to analytics reporting.
Step 1: Look Up Any Domain in PageSpeed Insights
You can use a tool like PageSpeed Insights or DebugBear’s Core Web Vitals test to check CrUX metrics for your own website and competitors.
These tools also provide insight into what you can do to improve your scores by analyzing what resources are loaded on your website and how they impact page speed.
Beyond the three Core Web Vitals metrics, Google provides additional CrUX data to help identify the root cause of performance problems. Specifically, you can:
- Break down page load time into server response time and image load time.
- See how much latency a typical visitor’s network connection adds.
- Check whether back/forward navigation is instant or triggers a full page reload.
Step 2: Create An Industry Ranking Dashboard For Mobile & Desktop Separately
You can use Google’s publicly available performance data to create an industry ranking.
- Enter your website URL into the page speed test.
- Record your Core Web Vitals metric values.
- Track what percentage of visitors have a good experience for each metric.
- Switch between mobile and desktop data and check metrics for both.
DebugBear makes it easy to automatically retrieve this data and set up a dashboard that stays up to date. In addition to the current performance scores, you can also view historical data.
Enter your own website and a list of competitor domains to start analyzing industry rankings and trends.
The CrUX dashboard makes it easy to show clients how changes to their websites have impacted Core Web Vitals, or to see what the fastest and slowest websites in your industry are. Make sure to check the visitor experience on both mobile and desktop devices.
You can see 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 one on a competitor’s website.
Compare results side by side to identify where competitors are outperforming you. This provides a strong visual demonstration of why visitors might prefer a competitor website compared to your own. Or, if you’re leading in your category, you can demonstrate the impact of your team’s efforts.
- Make a list of competitor websites.
- Check Core Web Vitals data for each of them.
- Identify top performers for each metric.
If you’d rather pull all of this automatically and track changes over time, DebugBear does it in one dashboard.
Step 4: Build A Dashboard To Visually Compare Websites
Metrics are a great way to track performance over time and to see how you rank in your industry. But they are not the most convincing way to explain to your team or client how poor performance is hurting user experience.
At DebugBear, we’ve compiled a number of pre-made industry dashboards across categories like news, AI, and travel.
Each dashboard shows a leaderboard of the highest-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’ll be able to see how your website loads visually, using a filmstrip rendering or video recording. This really shows that visitors wait for content to appear before they are able to interact with your website.
Outperform Your Competition With Comprehensive Performance Insights
Web performance is an important aspect of visitor experience on your website. To make your website fast you need to know what pages are slow, what’s slowing it down, and how to fix it.
DebugBear can help with all of these by providing three sources of performance data in one platform:
- Synthetic monitoring: run scheduled performance tests with detailed reporting.
- CrUX data: analyze and monitor the data that impacts Google rankings.
- Real user monitoring: Track visitor experience in real time and debug slow interactions.
Continuous monitoring ensures that you’ll get notified when new problems arise. And when there’s a regression you’ll be able to view a detailed before/after comparison to see what change on your website has impacted your metrics.
Scan your website to identify slow pages to focus your work where it matters most. You can also see how many of your pages are impacted by specific performance issues, so you can focus on the fixes with broad impact. This also works for the accessibility and SEO checks that are included with Google’s Lighthouse tool.
To build a strong performance culture in your organization you need to be able to clearly communicate user experience issues and communicate why they matter. 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 stand in comparison to your competitors, and start delivering a better user experience.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by Shutterstock. Used with permission.
In-Post Images: Images by DebugBear. Used with permission.