Lumar (formerly Deepcrawl)

It's the end of Feb already! I wanted to sign off this performance month with a post about Lighthouse and how to use it to get actions for your website First off what is Lighthouse - it's an open source tool that is built into Chrome and can be used to generate performance metrics for the active page (https://lnkd.in/eP3z4fxj) It's totally free to use and generates pretty detailed reports about what exact items on the page are causing problems as well as providing suggestions on how you can fix them and the potential benefit. Lighthouse is a great starting point for any sort of performance audit you want to conduct. Its only real downside is that using it in Chrome means you can only really test one page at a time. More on that later. To get started with it in the browser, head to a page that you want to run a report on and open up the Developer Tools (F12 on windows, Option + ? + J on Mac). If you look at the top of this new panel you will see a bunch of tabs, one of which should be "lighthouse" - if you don't see this immediately you may need to click the >> icon and select it from the drop down. From here there are various options which you can tweak depending on what you want to test, and a big blue button to start analysing. Clicking this button will generate a report for the current page, make sure you leave this open and shifting focus whilst this is calculating can mess up the report. Once the report is complete you will be presented with 4 scores which each have a total out of 100. These indicate where there are problems detected on the page and each one breaks down into lots of subsections which have specific details about what is impacting the score. You also get some screenshots of individual items as well as the code that is triggering the effects. Typically the way I use lighthouse is to gather multiple pages worth of details and group items that are the same together, the purpose being to tackle one problem that is impacting multiple pages. This is helpful for prioritising bigger site impacts and provides a better justification for getting this work done when you are pitching fixing these issues to developers. Generally speaking I would prioritise things that impact page loading over others as these tend to have the biggest effect on users and can quickly compound if there are multiple things delaying the page actually loading. Hopefully this was useful and if not hopefully this terrible drawing will make it worth your time! Hope you had a great February, next month I will be taking on the big topic of AI (LLM's) so buckle up or something

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Continuing on from last weeks post on web performance I wanted to move into the most common point of discussion - Core Web Vitals Core Web Vitals are interesting because Google has indicated that they have a direct impact on ranking - generally when Google openly says something impacts ranking it's because they are trying to encourage all web owners to improve these parts of their site. Core Web Vitals break down into three pieces, how long does it take your main content to load (LCP), how much do parts of your site move around after it's loaded (CLS) and how quickly does your site respond to interaction (INP) An especially important factor with CWV is that these are user generated metrics, so a page won't have any values if not enough people visit it using the Chrome browser. This is vitally important to understand as what is quick for a server to do might be painfully slow for a user on a mobile network. LCP is typically linked to overall server performance, it's rare that it takes a long time for your main content to load and the issue is isolated to just one element. This usually leads to looking at what is causing delays, if you are using a CMS like Wordpress then plugins are usually the main culprit. More complex websites might have slow data retrieval from databases or caching problems. CLS is usually down to poor web space definition. Specifically having an element load onto a page without having the space it is going to use set, when it pops in everything around it gets pushed around on the page. This leads to users clicking on wrong items and is generally very frustrating. Typically this is solved by defining the space an item is going to take up on a page, defining the dimensions of an item on the page means that even if the element is very slow to load, it won't interfere with the rest of the page INP is the newest in the Core Web Vitals set having previously been looking at just the First Input Delay (FID), INP calculates a score based on all interactions with a web page. Ultimately this metric was always about how responsive your site is to interaction and that hasn't changed, however now all interactions are considered it's a bit more representative of how a site actually performs when a user is clicking.? Problems here are likely to be fundamental, such as pulling data on click events rather than pre populating common actions like navigation bars, or actions that fetch new data often rather than relying on caches. Hopefully that was useful in understanding the underlying causes of problems within each of the CWV metrics, there is a lot more complexity to these and the way the score is generated at the end which I want to go into a bit more next week, particularly with CrUX Please enjoy my terrible picture of sharing your browsing with a bot

With last weeks post on Core Web Vitals (CWV) I wanted to go into more detail about CrUX dashboards as this is the main data provided by Google to monitor your website performance If you are not familiar with CrUX, it is the Chrome User Experience data which is recorded when a Chrome user visits your website, the CWV are gathered and then passed to Google to use within its rankings. If you want to view your scores you can see them in Search Console but you can also generate your own dashboard via Google : https://lnkd.in/eKyadaxR There is also a relatively new site intended to help dig into the data a bit more and understand the numbers : https://lnkd.in/eqvBUB4p The strength of these reports is in the overall trending for your website, if an issue was introduced and it impacts a large section of the popular pages then you should see an increase in negative scores and vice versa for positive impacts. The weakness of these reports is that they don't tell you what pages are being used to calculate the scores or how many pages. This limits the usefulness as more investigation is required before you can start to take actions. There are a few ways to use these reports, the primary use case is as an overall site health view allowing you to trend over 12 months the progress of your sitewide CWV. This helps you keep an eye on broad positive and negative changes, these are the ones that you want to catch as quickly as possible so that's pretty helpful. A secondary use case is to track your device performance as the reports can be split by desktop and mobile. The difference between your mobile and desktop performance can give you a big clue as to where problems are. If you want to get more specific and do a page by page analysis you can extract this information from the Google CrUX API or do a lighthouse report for a page, but keep in mind that a lighthouse report is run from your local machine. *warning self promotion* If you wanted to do this at scale then you can use Lumar as we do have lighthouse crawls and the ability to pull in real user metrics (RUM) from the CrUX api A final note about CrUX dashboards, due to the way that Google allows you to access the data around your website, the information is effectively publicly available, meaning that you can just pop in a competitors site and look at their data for the last 12 months, but also they can just do the same to your website. Useful to know if you are trying to figure out where you stand in the competitive landscape. Hope that was useful and if you made it this far as always here is a terrible drawing (it's a chrome UI joke and not a good one)

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The long awaited #WTSFest has officially kicked off with an introduction by the brilliant Areej AbuAli and now it's time for Analyse, the first talk track of the day with Alice Rowan ?? , Rebecca Y. and Naomi Francis-Parker!