What are the Core Web Vitals?
The ranking of your website no longer depends solely on content, but also on technical performance. Page speed, for example, is seen as the basis of every good user experience. And to attach even more importance to this topic, Google has introduced the Core Web Vitals metrics.
The Core Web Vitals are three measurements used to evaluate the user experience or usability of a website: LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), FID (First Input Delay) and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift). All three are an essential part of the ranking factors and are measured on this basis:
| Good | Needs improvement | Poor | |
|---|---|---|---|
| LCP | <=2.5s | <=4s | >4s |
| FID | <=100ms | <=100ms | >100ms |
| CLS | <=0.1 | <=0.25 | >0.25 |
But fast loading times do not only make the Googlebot happy and positively influence the search engine ranking. They also reduce the bounce rate. The longer visitors have to wait for a page to load, the higher the proportion of those who bounce and go to another website.
What is the relationship between the Core Web Vitals and etracker Analytics?
If external scripts are integrated on the website, this can have a negative impact on the loading speed of the website content. This particularly affects the First Input Delay (FID) metric, i.e. the time until the user can interact with the page. This involves milliseconds (see table above).
In order for etracker Analytics to collect data, the etracker code first initiates the loading of another script. This process can be synchronous or asynchronous. In synchronous mode, the actual content of the page is only loaded after the etracker code has been executed. In asynchronous mode scripts can be executed simultaneously. This means that in asynchronous mode, etracker Analytics has no influence on the loading speed of the website content and other scripts, thus ensuring top Core Web Vitals.
How to integrate the etracker code optimally for excellent Google rankings?
In order not to impair the loading speed and thus the Core Web Vitals and the Google ranking, the etracker code is now loaded asynchronously by default. This is because in asynchronous mode, the tracking has no influence on the loading speed of the website content and other scripts.
The asynchronous code can be found in all etracker accounts under Account Info → Settings → Setup/Tracking Code:
We recommend that customers who currently use the synchronous code simply adapt the existing etracker code. To do this, simply replace src=”//static.etracker.com/code/e.js” with src=”//code.etracker.com/code/e.js” in the code and add the async keyword.
When using the etracker Optimiser, however, we recommend using the synchronous mode so that changes are applied immediately before the pages are loaded and flickering effects are avoided. With the help of our Content Delivery Network technology, we also ensure the highest performance in script delivery here to minimise the impact on loading time.