Introduction
Google Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that measure how well your website performs for users. These metrics affect your ranking in Google search results, so it's important to optimize your website to get the best scores. Core Web Vitals focus on three main things:
Loading Speed: How fast your page loads.
Interactivity: How quickly your site responds to user actions.
Visual Stability: How stable your page is as it loads (avoiding things shifting around unexpectedly).
How to Check Core Web Vitals for Your Website
You can easily check your website's Core Web Vitals using Google’s tools:
Google Search Console: If you've added your website to Google Search Console, it has a dedicated section for Core Web Vitals. This tool gives you a report of your website’s performance based on real-world usage data (from people visiting your site).
PageSpeed Insights: You can also use PageSpeed Insights. Just enter your website’s URL, and the tool will give you a score for Core Web Vitals, along with suggestions for improving your page speed.
These tools not only show your Core Web Vitals scores but also offer insights and recommendations on how to improve them.
How to Improve Your Google Core Web Vitals
At Newsifier, we ensure that all websites running on our platform are optimized for both Page Speed and Google Core Web Vitals by using the latest coding standards. However, other factors can also affect these scores, including external elements like Ads, Google Analytics, and tracking scripts. Here’s what you should know:
How Ads, Google Analytics, and Other Tools Affect Page Speed
Ads Impact: Ads are vital for monetizing your website but they have a big impact on PageSpeed. As the website then also has to load the Ads code and Ads often images, videos, or scripts that need to be loaded along with the rest of the webpage. This is especially the case if you use multiple Ads networks.
It is a good idea to talk with your Ads agency to see how you can minimize the impact from Ads on your PageSpeed. But it is also important to understand that there is no way to run Ads on your website without compromising on PageSpeed.
Google Analytics Impact: When you use Google Analytics (or other analytics tools), it requires adding a piece of code (a script) to your website. This script allows Google Analytics to collect data about your visitors and their behavior on your site.
This script needs to be loaded and run every time someone visits your website, which is why it also impacts PageSpeed.
OneSignal and Push Notification Tools: OneSignal, or other services that use a tracking script, can also impact a website's Google PageSpeed score, much like Google Analytics and Ads. To use OneSignal, you need to add their script to your website. This script is what allows OneSignal to send push notifications to users who have subscribed. Just like any external script, the OneSignal script needs to load every time someone visits your website. The time it takes for this script to load can add to your website's overall loading time.
How to Identify What’s Slowing Down Your Website
You can check the PageSpeed and any possible issues that harm the PageSpeed by inserting the URL of a page into https://pagespeed.web.dev/
So when you see in your Google Search Console that there are issues with certain pages, please first investigate these pages yourself by inserting them in https://pagespeed.web.dev/ and see if these issues are related to Ads or external scripts.
When the tool has analyzed the page, it will give you an exact rundown of what is impacting PageSpeed and how much delay every issue is causing. Next to the issue, you see a label of the category of the issue, like ‘Ads’, ‘Marketing’, ‘Content’, or ‘Analytics’, which means that the issue is related to for example Ads, a Marketing tool, or something inside the content.
As Newsifier we have no control over issues related to Ads or external tracking tools like Google Analytics or OneSignal. So if you see Ads issues that are harming PageSpeed, then please contact directly your Ads Agency.
The only ads-related issues we can help you with are CLS issues. Here you can read How to solve CLS issues with our minimum height solution.