Core Web Vitals & Website Performance Consultancy

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Fun fact, the target load for a user who has already been on one of your pages is around 2 seconds which is roughly the time it takes the average person to turn a page in a book.
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What is Core Web Vitals and Performance Consultancy and what is involved?

Google likes to say that Core Web Vitals is not a ranking factor and therefore improving your scoring will not result in an improvement to your rankings. The sub-text here is that whilst it may not be a factor in the sense of pass means improvement and fail means drop, it does indirectly improve metrics which 100% are. Through looking over your website’s performance I can help improve bounce rate, pages per session and general user experience through removing slowness, jank and rage clicks.
Performance audit

Performance audit

The first step is to get an understanding of how you’re performing and where are the most pertinent areas to focus on. Auditing is done using both synthetic testing (point and shoot tools) and user data (often called RUM data – with RUM standing for Real User Measurement). I do the checks, distil the solutions into tickets and present back to you what needs doing and what is the expected upside.
Performance budgets and Engineer training

Performance budgets and Engineer training

A blind spot for most that engage in performance and Core Web Vitals improvements is that you need to consider how to keep it performant. I help brands with future projects by providing training for the engineering teams and helping with the creation of performance budgets – which allow for automated testing as part of CI/CD piplines.
Business casing

Business casing

One of the biggest wins associated with improving your websites performance is that it can have a meaningful impact on your bottom line. The logic goes that by not interrupting the user’s flow they are more likely to complete their intended action, so the more performant the website the better conversion. The best part of this however is that it’s easily measurable and can be modelled so to pitch upsides over tickets.

How the Process Works

Step 1

A deep-dive audit

Performance audits are helpful for two reasons, they firstly allow me to find and quantify issues that are presently hurting your site’s performance. Secondly, understanding what is causing a disruption and having data related to the amount of disruption being caused by issues, means I can present back to the business the expected improvements as part of the work – both financially and related to SEO.
Step 2

A proposal for the works (optional)

Using the data from the audits I can produce modelling to indicate what is the expected improvement to trading and user behaviour. This is very popular with decision makers and engineers, both of which enjoy knowing that the work is highly likely to be hugely impactful to the business and users.
Step 3

Tickets and quality assurance

All of my recommendations are distilled into tickets which can be used by engineers and are specific to your website. Once worked on, I also can support with both making sure it has been implemented as expected and recording the upside from the work using synthetic testing.
Step 4

Training and tooling setup

Once the work is done I’m keen to keep your site working fast and without lag. At this point I work with your engineers and product teams to establish best practices (training) and to introduce systems and budgets so to prevent slowness creeping back onto your website.
Have a question about the process?
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FAQ's

Do I need your help if I have a Product/Project manager?

I read this as a question of whether a generalist can do the job of a specialist.

Whilst a lot of things in SEO are arguably just being neat and in-keeping with commonplace best practices, it remains that considering how obvious and common these consideratiozs are they do not really create any sort of advantage in the market.

Anticipating what are going to be the most impactful of the more mature tactics is where an expert comes into play, allowing you to leverage their skills, experiences and training to avoid waste and get straight to the stuff that works.

Can I not focus on SEO after the site is live?

Technically speaking of course you can. The issue with this train of thought is the waste.

By not building it right the first time you waste time on the first iteration, potentially re-building or throwing away code and resources.

By sending live a site which is not optimised you waste creating a positive impression with search engines whilst the site is new. Depending on the issue, this can take quite a long time to unpick/solve (Google [Discovered – Currently Not Indexed]).

Lastly, by making your engineers work on code which they then throw away it wastes their enthusiasm for the project. Nobody wants to throw away something they spent a lot of time working on, least of all engineers that are motivated to do good work.

Should I have everything off the root or in directories?

This is admittedly a bit of a tangent but it comes up a lot! The short answer is both can work but it’s typically easier to work with your site when organised into directories. Spending 3 days tagging pages is not fun, and as you add more you need the team to remember to do it. Conversely, putting a page about puppies in the /dogs/ folder is obvious and doesn’t require any additional work.

A pro-tip here is also that when pulling data from search console you can get more from their API if you have profiles setup for each directory on your website – this is not an option for flat sites.

How to Contact Me
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hello@tomgregan.co.uk
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