Is your website fast enough? Check it using Core Web Vitals and GTMetrix
Curious to see how our client sites score with our default tech stack, we ran SEOAudits through Google’s Lighthouse today. The site was recently created on wpSites and features a custom domain. Custom domains are eligible for Cloudflare activation though this site has not connected it yet.
If you’ve been paying attention lately, there’s been a massive amount of Twitter chatter around Google’s Core Web Vitals, a measure of page load times. In some eyes, Core Web Vitals may be the biggest thing since Google championed AMP in 2016 and EAT in 2019.
According to Google, poor speeds have a severe effect on bounce rates. Meaning, people leave the site quickly. For example:
- If page load time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds, the bounce rate increases 32%
- If page load time increases from 1 second to 6 seconds, the bounce rate increases by 106%
“Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web.” Philip Walton
As Lighthouse is a “lab” emulation, we checked a few other leading tools, including GTMetrix and Pingdom. Pingdom is usually an excellent tool, but this time missed a number of key metrics, so we focussed on GT Metrix, a tool preferred by many professional web devs and marketers. The key tech behind this website on wpSites is WordPress, WPRocket, RankMath, and Kadence Blocks.
Lighthouse core web vitals scores shine brightest!
Mobile Scores: not perfect, but really good.
Desktop Scores: as perfect as we’ve seen.
Then, GT Metrix, comparing seoaudits against its peers, the industry leaders.
Check out how wpSites scores against the popular website platforms: Wix, Weebly, Godaddy Websites, HubSpot, and Squarespace.
We’re very pleased with the scores from both Lighthouse and GTMetrix.
The tech stack in wpSites has been selected, tested, and optimized for performance and SEO. Our users deserve nothing less. If you haven’t signed up for a free site, please do. You’ll start with our Forever Free subscription and core tech stack. Upgrading is optional.
To learn more about Google’s core updates, check out Marie Haynes’ excellent article discussing EAT, Phillip Walton’s article discussing Core Web Vitals, and Randy Milanovic’s article discussing AMP.