You may be thinking to yourself, Why would I monitor Web Vitals when I can get a free report from Google with very similar information?

It is very important to be aware of the factors that influence your Core Web Vital scores as they are heavily impacted by your site at the time of the test and other factors such as device type, signal strength etc. For example, you might manually check your CWV scores every Tuesday at 1 PM but completely miss the drop in scores later on in the day/week caused by a third party.

When it comes to your monitoring setup we recommend setting up a full monitoring suite on any page that you deem to be important. If you are unsure we recommend starting with:

Homepage – Assess the reliability and performance of the first page your customers are likely to encounter.

Product Listing Page – Ensure customers can navigate products

Product Description Page – A popular item that ideally stays on your site. This will provide an indicator of you products on the site.

These recommendations are for an eCommerce site however they can also be applied to other industries. Essentially you are wanting to capture as much data about the start, middle and end of the customer journey. Just for context, a full monitoring suite would include Uptime, Page Load, Core Web Vitals, Lighthouse and a user journey to capture pages further on in the customer journey (Such as checkout/billing).

The page load and user journey act as complementary monitors to the Core Web Vitals and Lighthouse as they offer a snapshot of what was going on at different times during the day. They are especially effective at identifying slow load speeds, poorly performing third parties and service-impacting problems on your site that can be compared to the performance data.

But let’s specifically look at the performance monitors, How often should you set them up?

For the Core Web Vital monitor we would recommend being at a frequency of either 3 or 6 hours. This provides either 4 or 8 data points at different points in the day and allows you to compare and trend data.

The Lighthouse Monitor we wouldn’t recommend being as frequent and instead being set to a frequency of either 12 or 24 hours (daily). This is because the monitor captures a large amount of data which is good to track but not very useful at higher frequencies.