How to measure the speed of your website
There are ways to track Core Web Vitals data yourself and make it visible in your GA4 dashboards, however, this often takes too much maintenance and the number of updates Google makes is difficult to keep up with. Therefore, many merchants opt for a RUM tool, which takes over that part from them. In addition, the amount of data, filters and degree of real-time is also limited in GA4.
Tracking page speed data via Google Lighthouse
Because website speed tracking is not included by default with GA4, there are other ways to get an idea of your website's performance.
Google does offer other tools to track the speed of your website. For example pagespeed insights, which shows real user and synthetic page speed data. However, this has nuances:
- The real-time (field) data is 28 days delayed.
- Synthethic data (page speed score) won't tell you what your own users experience, which we'll tell your more about.
Tracking page speed with RUMvision
Now, do you really want to optimize for your own visit without having to maintain all your GA4 dashboards and data? Then look for a tool like RUMvision. In RUMvision, there are several dashboards that make measuring your core web vitals and page speed very insightful and even help you find areas for improvement. And the best part? Everything is in real-time, so when you make a deploy you'll have insights into the performance impact within the hour, depending on your amount of traffic.
Why doesn't the page speed score tell me enough?
The page speed score is created from a synthetic (fake) visit to your website. This visit does not interact with the page and may not be representative of who your real visitors are, think internet speed, location and device memory.
The simulated visit looks as following:
We looked at what the top 100 Dutch ecommerce websites (revenue-wise) are doing in terms of page speed score and actual Core Web Vitals.
- 75% of the webites did not pass for the Interaction to Next Paint
- 50% failed the Core Web Vitals
Correlation with the page speed score and real UX
There are many agencies and therefore merchants who focus on achieving a 90+ page speed score. This may be a nice goal for developers, but business-wise it will bring you little extra. Why? There are many web shops that have a 20 to 40 score and easily reach the Core Web Vitals. Would they still insist on the page speed score, they would waste a lot of time and maybe even make real UX worse.
What research showed us
Of course, we also examined the correlation between page speed score and user experience ourselves. We did this based on the top 100 Dutch ecommerce sites. We saw the following:
- 53 domains fail the Core Web Vitals on their homepage: average pagespeed score of 34
- 50 domains pass the Core Web Vitals on their homepage: average pagespeed score of 44
This can have several causes, for example, one platform achieves a better score out-of-the box. This does not necessarily say anything about how it will eventually perform in the real world in terms of website speed.
Would you believe that the website below has a page speed score of 41 (on November 30rd 2023)? Check it yourself.
Conclusion
If you want to spend a lot of time creating and mainaining your GA4 page speed dashboards you can start doing that, but keep in mind that you won't have all the data neccessary. Do you want to have the most complete insights you can start by using RUMvision, we also offer plans for (big) agencies. Reach out to talk or have a personal demo.
