This post is sponsored by DebugBear. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the sponsors.
What performance metrics actually affect my Google visibility?
How can I find out which pages to fix first?
How well is my site performing?
In this article, you’ll learn how to create an industry-standard dashboard to benchmark your success and identify opportunities to improve for greater impact.
How Google Measures Web Performance and 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 is loaded also plays a big role in whether your website will meet your business goals.
Let’s take a look at some of the factors that affect user experience and what they mean for how visitors perceive your website.
3 Web Essentials That Affect Your Google Rankings
Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics focus on three performance factors:
- Page loading speed: measured by Large Content Paint (LCP).
- Responding to user interaction: measured by Interaction to Next Paint (INP).
- Visible stability: measured by Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
To pass the Core Web Vitals test and get a boost in SERP visibility, you need to provide good information on all of these metrics.
Google has published guidelines that define what constitutes a good user experience. Aim to stay within these limits for at least 75% of visits to get the most SEO benefit.
How Response Time Affects Whether Visitors Stay and Check Out
A fast website also affects how users engage with your content. Latency discourages users from fully exploring your website. When you sell things online, visitors may never find a product that solves their problem. Or a media business delay can result in fewer page views and ad impressions.
Usability researcher Jakob Nielsen described a three-stage model of different response time limits and their impact on user behavior:
- 0.1 seconds: direct access to instant content.
- 1 second: free roaming without interruption.
- 10 seconds: a loss of attention that makes users disengage.
To increase conversions, don’t just grab the user’s attention, make it easy and fun for visitors to explore your website.
How to Check Real-User Core Web Vitals for Your Website
How do you know what the real visitor experience looks like on competitor websites?
Google publishes this data in the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX).
This data is collected from actual Chrome users who are logged into their Google account and opt-in to statistical reporting.
Step 1: Check Any Domain in PageSpeed Insights
You can use a tool like PageSpeed Insights or DebugBear’s Core Web Vitals test to check the CrUX metrics of your website and competitors.
These tools also provide insight into what you can do to improve your scores by analyzing what resources are being loaded on your website and how they affect page speed.
Beyond the three Core Web Vitals metrics, Google provides additional CrUX data to help identify the root cause of performance issues. Specifically, you can:
- Split page load time into server response time and image load time.
- See how much a typical guest network connection adds to the latency.
- Check if navigating back/forward is fast or triggers a full page reload.
Step 2: Create Mobile & Desktop Industry Ranking Dashboard Separately
You can use publicly available Google performance data to create an industry standard.
- Enter your website URL in the page speed test.
- Record the values of your Core Web Vitals metric.
- Track what percentage of visitors have a positive 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 you are always up to date. In addition to current performance scores, you can also view historical data.
Enter your website and a list of your competing domains to begin analyzing industry standards 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 are in your industry. Be sure to test the visitor experience on both mobile and desktop devices.
You can see performance data for different types of devices, and check both website-wide data and specific URLs.
Step 3: Go back to your top 3–5 competitor URLs
Now, do a test on your website and one on a competitor’s website.
Compare results side-by-side to identify where competitors are performing better than you. This provides a powerful visual representation of why visitors would choose a competitor’s website over yours. Or, if you’re a leader in your category, you can show the impact of your team’s efforts.
- Make a list of your competitor’s websites.
- Check the Core Web Vitals data for each of them.
- Identify the top performers for each metric.
If you’d like to 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 see how you rank in your industry. But they’re not the most convincing way to explain to your team or client how poor performance is hurting the user experience.
At DebugBear, we have compiled a number of pre-made industry dashboards across categories such as news, AI, and travel.
Each dashboard displays a leaderboard of the top performing websites in a category, along with trend data showing whether they are fast or slow.
When you run a website speed test, you will be able to see how your website loads visually, using filmstrip rendering or video recording. This really shows that visitors are waiting for content to appear before they can interact with your website.
Outpace Your Competition with Complete Performance Insights
Web functionality is an important aspect of a visitor’s experience on your website. To make your website faster you need to know which pages are slow, what is slowing them down, and how to fix them.
DebugBear can help with all of this by providing three sources of performance data in one place:
- Performance monitoring: perform scheduled performance tests with detailed reporting.
- CrUX data: analyze and monitor data that affects Google rankings.
- Real-time user monitoring: Track visitor information in real-time and fix slow interactions.
Continuous monitoring ensures that you will be notified when new problems arise. And if there is a regression you will be able to view a detailed before/after comparison to see which change to your website has impacted your metrics.
Scan your website for 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 fixes that have a wider impact. This also works for accessibility and SEO testing included with the Google Lighthouse tool.
To build a strong work culture in your organization you need to be able to clearly communicate user experience issues and communicate why they are important. With DebugBear, you can correlate real user performance data with session duration and conversion rates, to see how a fast website delivers real business values.
Sign up for a free trial to start monitoring web performance with DebugBear, see where you stand against your competitors, and start delivering a better user experience.
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Featured Image: Image by Shutterstock. Used with permission.
Images Within Posts: Images by DebugBear. Used with permission.
