TL;DR

Slow websites frustrate users, reduce conversions, increase bounce rates and can negatively impact search visibility – and over the last *cough*almost twenty years*cough* expectations of site speed and performance have only grown, both from customers and from search engines.

MMC Digital’s Core Web Vitals and Performance Analysis service provides a detailed audit of your site’s speed and technical performance, identifying both quick wins and deeper code-level improvements. The result is a prioritised roadmap to help improve user experience, pass Core Web Vitals, and maximise conversion potential. 

Pain points

Whether you’ve replatformed, rebuilt or just grown your site over time, you can eventually find yourself pulling out your hair waiting for your pages to load. Worse even than that, your customers will be giving up and moving on to the next site in the SERP. While site speed has always been important to user experience and, therefore, to conversion, customer expectations of what is perceived as ‘fast enough’ have only become tougher to achieve – all while the expectation for various java-script heavy applications have increased at the same time.

Added to that Google’s push for Core Web Vitals (CWV) and inclusion as a ‘minor’ ranking signal (a tie breaking metric between sites of similar performance), and you have ever increasing expectations combined with an increasingly heavy technical burden.

So, if you’ve started to dread loading up your site, or you’re having trouble with any of the following, get in touch:

• Dropping conversion rates
• An ever decreasing time on site and increasing bounce rate
• Consistently failing Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console 
• Small, but sitewide drops in p.1-3 rankings.
• An increased number of abandoned baskets.

What we mean by Core Web Vitals and performance analysis

Site speed is not a nice to have, it’s a minimum requirement for sites looking to succeed in search in any vertical. Customer expectations remain the same whether you’re looking for B2B lead generation or D2C ecommerce. Simply put – if you’re not fast enough, your customers are going to (and quickly) look elsewhere.

The above, from Cloudflare is a chart we’ve been using for a good 5-6 years, is a good reference, but we’d be exceptionally surprised if expectations hadn’t grown in that time (how often are you impressed by a 2.4 second load time?). However, this is a time to full page load, and perception is often offset by first paint load times – where the site looks ready even if it might not be ready.

When we talk about CWV and performance analysis, we’re talking about a thorough audit of your site’s performance, and the production of a document detailing improvements and targeted tweaks that can be made to your code base that, if implemented, will help your site to exceed both human and machine expectations, helping you achieve that small ranking boost and the conversion rate improvements that go along with it.

MMC Digital’s Core Web Vitals and performance analysis service

An audit rather than an implementation exercise (though we can put you in touch with the best people to rectify your issues), our CWV and performance analysis surveys your site from the ground up. We’re not going to try to charge you for a few pages copied and pasted from a Lighthouse Report, Page Speed Insights Report or Google Search Console (though we will likely use most of these), this is about going through your code-base with a fine toothed comb to uncover where you can save milliseconds, and prioritising the suggestions by ease of implementation and likely cost of implementation.

There are plenty of really simple changes that can be made – for example: deferring loading of images below the fold and Java Script that doesn’t need to be executed before the page loads; reducing the number of fonts and external file calls; using a service like Cloudflare; properly sizing images and adding the right height and width attributes to containers, and there are more tricky fixes like optimising thread work in your DOM – but if there’s an improvement to be had, we’ll document it and offer advice on next steps. 

There are plenty of quick fixes sold online – plugins and image optimisers and the like, but unless the hard work is done properly at least once, you’ll end up with the same issue a few months down the line. We don’t offer this service just because it’s something we can do, we do it because this is one of the areas businesses consistently struggle with and, when they are struggling, one they consistently find difficult to get fixed. We’ll provide you with the roadmap you need to start reaping the benefits of a speedy site.

What can our  Core Web Vitals and performance analysis service do for your business?

This service is about giving you a roadmap to improve a vital part of your online presence. We’ve discussed the reasons that this should be considered a necessity – its impact on rankings, UX and conversion rate – and that’s why we offer the service. We provide you a roadmap and prioritised list of changes to help you manage a site performance project and make sure that your site is able to reap the rewards that come with peak performance.