A faster website is better for clients: they buy more, and they engage more with your content. However there's someone else that rewards fast websites: Google. Fast websites rank higher in organic search results than slower websites. They will also achieve higher quality scores in Google Ads, resulting in lower ad spend.
We've previously written about Google's Web Vitals, and how Google will be using them as search signals from May 2021. You might have wondered how these Web Vitals will be determined. Will they be gathered by the Google Bot? No. Google has another method, which it has been working on for several years.
Introducing the Chrome UX Report (CRuX)
The CRuX report is a public data set of real-user measurements (RUM) of website performance across millions of sites. The report has been around since 2017 and is updated daily, but until recently the data was difficult to access.
The data is collected from real Chrome browser users who have opted in to send browsing information back to Google. This opt-in requires that the user has:
- Opted in to syncing browser history
- Not set up a sync passphrase
- Usage statistic reporting enabled
Despite these conditions, millions of Chrome users still report statistics back to Google. A given website still needs to be fairly busy before there are useful statistics in the report.
Gathered Metrics
Apart from the Web Vitals, the report also gathers the following event timings:
- DOMContentLoaded: when the main document has loaded
- onload: when a page and all its associated resources have been downloaded and parsed;
Dimensions
Because performance can vary widely, the metrics are divided into the following dimensions to help segment and understand the user experience.
- Country
- Device Type: Tablet, Phone, Desktop
- Connection Speed: slow 2g, 2g, 3g, 4g, or offline
Viewing data in the report
There are several ways to see how your website performs in the report. These include:
Pagespeed insights
Google's website analysis tool provides summary CRuX data for the analysed URL and, if data is available, for the entire site.
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Google BigQuery
The most flexible option is to access it directly via BigQuery. You query it with SQL (database query language).
The downside is that you need to understand SQL and have a Google account.
Google's Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools)
The search console now has a section 'Core Web Vitals' that shows whether URLs pass the Core Web Vitals, as well as a historical graph of performance for both mobile and desktop.
Google's Data Studio
Data Studio is a data visualisation tool that lets you build dashboards on top of the CrUX report (amongst other big data sources). It lets you create a useful visualisation of the performance of your (or someone else's) website over time.
Third party tools
Like our own competitor speed report. It uses the Chrome UX API to retrieve the information.
Conclusion - Why you should care
The data in the Chrome UX Report is how Google sees the performance of your website. It is also a free source of real-world user measurements of your website performance, which helps you gauge how users see your website. If you want your site to rank well and to lower your ad costs, your website must pass the Web Vitals. The Chrome UX Report is the source of truth.
