Google offers a variety of tools to examine your Page Experience metrics. When combined, these tools can help you audit and improve your website.
Search Console’s Core Web Vitals
The Core Web Vitals report shows how your pages perform, based on real world usage data (sometimes called field data). This report helps you learn which groups of pages on your site require optimization and why. Pages are ranked as “Poor,” “Need Improvement,” or “Good.” The tool is also good for providing you with an overview of your website. Other programs, such as PageSpeed Insights, are more useful if you’re looking for page-by-page recommendations.
The Web Vitals Chrome extension is a diagnostic tool that measures changes in Core Web Vitals in real time on desktop devices. It also includes CrUX (Chrome UX) data for the current page if it is represented in the CrUX dataset.
Lighthouse in Dev Tools
Lighthouse is a lab data tool that provides specific opportunities for improving page performance. It will audit your website for multiple factors that include performance, accessibility, SEO, progressive web apps (PWAs) and more.
Page Speed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is a tool that reports field data from CrUX (Chrome UX) and lab data from Lighthouse for a given page. PSI will provide a page speed score, a perceived loading speed, and a list of improvement opportunities.
Field vs. Lab Data
You probably noticed that the tools mentioned talk a lot about field data and lab data. Note that Field data is “real” data based on statistics collected by Google. Field data is more accurate than lab data. Lab data is produced by simulating usage. Both are valuable in providing insight into your website performance.
Now that Page Experience is a ranking factor, it is important to utilize the measurement tools mentioned here so that you can ensure your site is delivering optimal performance to your users.It
