Check your Web Vitals-Welcome to Day 5 of your website optimization journey. Today’s focus is on understanding and checking your Web Vitals, a critical set of metrics that Google uses to measure user experience. These metrics reflect how quickly your site loads, how stable it is while loading, and how quickly it becomes interactive.
But optimizing Web Vitals isn’t just about performance—it’s about making sure search engines know what to crawl. You may have a fast and beautiful site, but if you’re not communicating to search engines what to crawl, your optimization efforts may not yield their full SEO potential.
In this article, we’ll break down what Web Vitals are, how to check them, how to improve them, and most importantly—how they connect to defining what to crawl for maximum visibility in search results.
What Are Web Vitals?
Web Vitals are a set of standardized metrics that evaluate the speed, responsiveness, and visual stability of your website. Google’s key Web Vitals include:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance. LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load.
- First Input Delay (FID): Measures interactivity. FID should be less than 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability. CLS should maintain a score of less than 0.1.
If these elements aren’t optimized, even the best content won’t hold users’ attention. And without communicating what to crawl effectively, search engines may miss the most optimized parts of your site.
Why Web Vitals Matter for SEO
Google uses Web Vitals as part of its page experience signals, which influence search rankings. A fast, stable, and interactive site contributes to higher SEO performance. However, you must also make sure Googlebot can find and analyze these optimized pages.
This is where what to crawl becomes critical. If you’ve optimized your homepage for speed but haven’t included it in your sitemap or it’s blocked in your robots.txt file, Google may not index it efficiently. Ensuring your optimized pages are crawlable is as important as the optimization itself.
How to Check Your Web Vitals
There are multiple tools available to test your Web Vitals. Here are the best options:
1. Google PageSpeed Insights
Enter your URL and see real-time data for LCP, FID, and CLS on both mobile and desktop.
2. Google Search Console – Core Web Vitals Report
This tool provides performance metrics across all your indexed pages and flags those with poor user experience.
3. Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools
This built-in tool gives in-depth analysis and actionable tips on improving Web Vitals.
After checking, identify the pages that need improvement and determine what to crawl based on user interaction and performance scores.
Step-by-Step: How to Improve Web Vitals
1. Improve Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- Optimize images (compress, use modern formats like WebP)
- Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS
- Upgrade your hosting if server response time is high
Once improved, tell search engines what to crawl by updating your sitemap or resubmitting URLs in Google Search Console.
2. Reduce First Input Delay (FID)
- Minimize JavaScript execution
- Use web workers to handle long tasks
- Break up large JS bundles
After making these changes, ensure you guide bots to the improved pages. Update indexing directives to signal what to crawl.
3. Lower Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
- Always include size attributes for images and video
- Avoid inserting content above existing content unless necessary
- Use font-display: swap for web fonts
As with LCP and FID, reflect these changes in your sitemap and robots.txt file so search engines know exactly what to crawl.
Aligning Web Vitals with What to Crawl
Improving your Web Vitals is pointless if bots aren’t crawling the right pages. Here’s how to make sure your optimization efforts are visible to search engines:
✅ Update Your Sitemap
Make sure that every page you’ve optimized for Web Vitals is included in your XML sitemap. This explicitly tells search engines what to crawl.
✅ Use Robots.txt Correctly
Avoid disallowing folders or files that affect Web Vitals (e.g., blocking access to scripts or stylesheets that are required for rendering). If Googlebot can’t access these resources, it may misjudge your performance.
✅ Use Canonical Tags
Use canonical tags to show search engines the preferred version of a page. This helps focus crawling resources on the right version of content, again reinforcing what to crawl.
Track Your Progress
After optimization, use Google Search Console to monitor whether the changes have improved your rankings and user experience. You can:
- Check indexing status
- Monitor mobile usability
- Track Core Web Vitals performance over time
Always ensure your efforts in improving Web Vitals are reflected in the way search engines see your site. Keep adjusting your what to crawl strategy based on analytics insights.
Pro Tips to Maximize Crawl Efficiency
- Group similar pages in your sitemap based on performance metrics (e.g., fast-loading blog posts, optimized product pages)
- Prioritize high-traffic pages for Web Vitals optimization
- Use internal links to point to well-performing pages and reinforce what to crawl
- Regularly audit your robots.txt and sitemap files to stay in control of what gets indexed
By keeping your Web Vitals and what to crawl in sync, you ensure that search engines understand your site’s best assets.
Conclusion
On Day 5, checking and improving your Web Vitals is a strategic move that directly impacts SEO and user engagement. However, your optimization efforts won’t deliver results unless search engines know what to crawl. By guiding crawlers to your most optimized, user-friendly pages, you multiply the impact of your technical improvements.
Remember: performance + visibility = success. Check your Web Vitals regularly, continue to optimize based on data, and always align those changes with a clear strategy for what to crawl. This holistic approach ensures both users and search engines experience your site at its best.