The Importance of a Benchmark Report for Google’s New Core Web Vitals

Justin Taylor - April 2, 2021

With the upcoming Page Experience ranking signal being released by Google in May, finding out where your site stands in terms of their new Core Web Vitals (CWV) ranking metrics (part of the Page Experience update) will be crucial in getting any underperforming pages up to snuff by the time the new ranking signal goes live. Putting together a CWV benchmark report will help you outline groups of pages on your site that are underperforming and prioritize resources to get them optimized.

It’s important to note that while page experience is important, Google still seeks to rank pages with the best information overall, but all things being equal, a page with a better Page Experience will have better visibility in search. 

Setting up a benchmark report will help you see how you stack up to these new metrics and provide a starting point for future optimizations. The goal of the report is to visualize, at a glance, the current health of your site in terms of the CWV’s.

We can start putting together this benchmark report by referencing Google’s Core Web Vitals report in Search Console. (For more information, check out my previous post that provides an overview of the report.) It’s broken down into Mobile and Desktop data, so that’s how we’ll display the total URL breakdown on our benchmark report:

Next we’ll want to see the breakdown of mobile and desktop pages by the 3 metrics that make up the new CWV:

Lastly, we’ll analyze the Poor Mobile pages by URL groupings to see what section(s) of the site are experiencing the most issues:

Once those pages are outlined, we can move onto the Poor Desktop pages, then Need Improvement Mobile and subsequently Desktop URLs. After we’ve assessed the most likely culprit for each URL grouping, we recommend consulting with a developer to gain insight into the specific changes that need to be made in order to optimize the pages, then validate those changes in Google Search Console to see if the statuses of the flagged pages has improved.

As the Page Experience update rolls out, it will be important to monitor how your pages are performing by checking in on that Core Web Vitals report and comparing it to the Benchmark report.

If you need help putting together your own benchmark report or how to optimize underperforming pages on your site in terms of their Core Web Vitals, please reach out and a member of our team will help you get your website ready for Google’s new Page Experience update.