According to Google, they are going to start using Web Core Vitals to rank websites in May 2021. Google is already storing this information and you can access it in your Google Search Console, Core Web Vitals section. Alternatively, you can run a check of any website at PageSpeed Insights. If you use this tool, bear in mind that the data Google will take into account is the Field data, which corresponds to the real data based on user experience. On the other hand, the Lab data is a simulation of the worst case scenario, using a really low internet connection. It could be useful as well, but it doesn’t measure the real cases.
Having said this, we have been checking out some Frontity websites and they score pretty well in the Field data, but we would like to do some research to ensure that passing the Web Core Vitals is easily achievable in a Frontity project. At the end, we would like to end up with:
- Improvements in the framework.
- Recommendations / Resources to Frontity users to implement them in their themes and packages.
- Explanations on how to measure the performance improvements.
The idea of this topic is talk about different things we could try, share the results of the different tests and share resources that could be interesting for anyone. We will run the tests mainly in our own web, frontity.org, and in our blog, which is using the twentytwenty-theme
at this moment.
Any feedback, idea or useful resource is really welcome
Summary
In order to have the information easily available, we will keep updated this summary in the opening post, but bear in mind that the information below will change.
Tests
In order to keep track of the tests, we will use the following Google Sheets where we will store the different hypothesis we want to test and the results once we have done it. We could add more metrics if we want. For example in some cases it could be interesting to compare the Time to First Byte or the bundle size.