[HN Gopher] Web Vitals: essential metrics for a healthy site
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Web Vitals: essential metrics for a healthy site
Author : feross
Score : 123 points
Date : 2020-05-05 16:03 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.chromium.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.chromium.org)
| splitrocket wrote:
| Layout Shift is one of my biggest pet peeves.
|
| Especially in search interfaces.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Of which google is a prime offender. 20 minutes ago I
| repeatedly clicked a google ad because my search goal was there
| just before it popped in.
| CM30 wrote:
| Makes you wonder how much money Google (and sites running ads
| in general) make due to people doing that. I'm sure quite a
| few people must accidentally click on ads they didn't mean to
| clik on due to that shift.
| anderspitman wrote:
| Is there a name for that little suggestion box that slides
| into place, and more importantly is there a way to turn it
| off? I've trained my self to wait a couple seconds before
| clicking on links because it's popped under my cursor so many
| times.
| ken wrote:
| I wrote a CSS rule to hide it, and the Google changed their
| DOM structure so it broke. Then I updated my user
| stylesheet, then they broke it again.
|
| I don't have the energy to continue, so I'm left with that
| classic software dilemma: good underlying technology, or
| good UI.
| eitland wrote:
| You might in the B group of an A/B test.
|
| This happened to a colleague of mine not that long ago and I
| told him the trick is to report just about anything using the
| feedback tool and observe the most crazy bugs disappear in
| less than an hour as you get reassigned to tve A group ;-)
|
| Another educated guess is a plug-in. I might have seen
| plugins that seems to optimize for ad click through by adding
| elements to move the ads just under yiur mouse pointer.
| henriquez wrote:
| These are useful performance indicators for sure, but I don't
| understand how these are different than the metrics already built
| into Chromium's "Lighthouse" page speed audit (the "Audits" tab
| in the inspector).
|
| Is the difference now that they will be more heavily weighed in
| search engine ranking? The article wasn't super clear on this,
| and the explanatory links seemed to push towards drinking a lot
| of Google kool-aid (eg. to measure the Core Web Vitals you must
| use Chrome UX report, and to do that you must use Google
| BigQuery, and to do that you must create a Google Account _and_ a
| Google Cloud Project. Wow.)
|
| On closer inspection this whole thing is just a thinly veiled
| advertisement for GCP. No thanks.
| tbodt wrote:
| > to measure the Core Web Vitals you must use Chrome UX report
|
| No, you just need this bit of javascript:
| https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web-vitals
| cramforce wrote:
| Lighthouse is a lab-metric system while Web Vitals is a "real-
| user-metric" system. Both approaches are valid, and have their
| pros and cons.
|
| Generally, lab metrics are convenient because you can run them
| whenever you'd like including before deploying to prod. But
| they can never tell you the ground-truth of what is really
| happening out there that real-user-metrics provide.
|
| E.g. the FID metrics only make sense when someone actually
| interacts with your site. Lighthouse cannot know when people
| would interact and thus cannot calculate the metric.
| henriquez wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification, that makes sense.
|
| It is ironic that the vast majority of these performance
| issues are caused by render-blocking and CPU-sucking
| JavaScript, and so the recommended approach is to install yet
| another client side JS library
| (https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web-vitals/), which appears
| to only work in Chrome, and then use the library to post
| client side performance data to Google Analytics (though to
| be fair it could be any analytics).
|
| "How badly are all your JS libraries slowing down your page?
| Find out with this one weird JS library!"
|
| This seems like one of those things where if you get to the
| point where you need this, you're already in too deep.
| igrigorik wrote:
| @cramforce nailed it. One thing I'll add.. I would strongly
| encourage everyone to collect "field" (real user
| measurement) data for each of these metrics via their own
| analytics, as that'll give you the most depth and
| flexibility in doing root cause analysis on where to
| improve, etc. The mentions of CrUX and other Google-powered
| tools are not to create any dependencies, but to help lower
| the entry bar for those that may not have RUM monitoring
| already, or will need some time to get that in place.. For
| those users, we offer aggregated insights and lab-
| simulations (Lighthouse) to get a quick pulse for these
| vitals.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| In Google documentation you'll hear this distinction
| described as "lab data" versus "field data":
| https://web.dev/how-to-measure-speed/#lab-data-vs-field-data
| [deleted]
| dmitriid wrote:
| What good are all these metrics, and measures, and approaches,
| and techniques when Google's own websites en masse wouldn't give
| two craps about them?
|
| Physician, heal thyself.
| Guest0918231 wrote:
| I just loaded a few Google services I use. AdSense takes 6
| seconds to load. DoubleClick takes 10-15 seconds to load.
| Running a speed test on fast.com I'm getting 200Mbps.
|
| Without question Google makes the slowest and least responsive
| sites I use. It's like the 600lbs man giving tips for staying
| in shape and living a healthy lifestyle. When they have a
| nearly unlimited budget and access to some of the best
| engineers and infrastructure on the planet, and they can't
| practice what they preach, it's difficult for me to listen.
| anderspitman wrote:
| Switching from Google Analytics to GoatCounter[0] was one of
| the best decisions I ever made for my personal site. I hadn't
| realized that the slowness of GA was keeping me from using
| it. The UI of GC is so fast that I often check it for fun,
| even on my phone.
|
| [0]: https://www.goatcounter.com/
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Are you referring to the AdSense and DoubleClick websites?
| brlewis wrote:
| Why shouldn't they reach out to the public at the same time as
| reaching out to the rest of Google? It's a huge organization.
| slig wrote:
| These metrics are good because your users care, and you can
| lose money if they leave, and that's why you should care.
| amenod wrote:
| Of course you should care. It is just ironic that Google is
| preaching this.
| eh78ssxv2f wrote:
| It's not Google that's preaching this. It's Chrome. Sure,
| Chrome is owned by Google. but at the scale of Google, you
| might as well consider them as independent organizations.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| What Google sites are you referring to and what "do as I say,
| not as I do" behavior are you seeing? I'm not doubting you, I'm
| just asking for specific URLs so that I can forward the
| feedback to specific teams.
| fenwick67 wrote:
| Gmail and YouTube were the first Google products I could
| think of (other than search), neither loads in under a second
| over WiFi where I have 50Mbps. Not even with a warm cache.
| walshemj wrote:
| it matters for SEO / inbound marketing
| tobr wrote:
| Great, three new TLAs that people will soon be throwing around in
| Medium posts without defining them.
| compacct27 wrote:
| These are great, but increasingly none of our web app's
| performance issues relate to any of these metrics.
|
| Memory leaks, slow typing, UI interactions like opening a modal
| that shouldn't be taking 8s+, where's the literature on how
| _those_ affect user satisfaction?
| dflock wrote:
| There is copious, voluminous literature stating that users hate
| slowness in all it's forms?
| compacct27 wrote:
| I believe it, but I mostly hear about how user retention
| drops off if the website takes more than 1s to load.
|
| And while I believe other types of slowness make users
| unhappy without seeing the literature, the people driving our
| priorities don't see the $ impact at all
| gumby wrote:
| I hate slow sites and am pretty aggressive about bailing on
| anything that I consider slow.
|
| _But_ speed is a visitor 's feature, not a benefit. The
| benefit (to the web site operator) of an ecommerce site is
| $ spent by visitor.
|
| So for example yes, the Amazon site feels slow and bloated,
| but they've been doing live A/B testing for over 20 years
| and I'm pretty sure they don't care about speed unless it
| affects conversion; they'll be happy to cram something in
| even if it slows the site down, if it increases revenue.
| dfabulich wrote:
| > _slow typing, UI interactions like opening a modal that
| shouldn 't be taking 8s+, where's the literature on how those
| affect user satisfaction?_
|
| That's right there in the post. Google calls these things
| "input delay." One of the three primary metrics called out in
| Google's post is FID, "first input delay," which is the delay
| on the first user interaction.
|
| (Subsequent input delays are also bad for users, but subsequent
| input delays are usually only as bad as the first input delay.)
| kaycebasques wrote:
| > (Subsequent input delays are also bad for users, but
| subsequent input delays are usually only as bad as the first
| input delay.)
|
| I'm not sure about this statement. It sounds reasonable but I
| can't recall seeing any research about FID being a proxy for
| all input delay throughout the entire duration of a session.
| I would hypothesize that optimizations that improve FID would
| also tend to improve input delay in general. My main message
| here is just that I haven't seen that research.
| igrigorik wrote:
| Input delay is bad, period.
|
| It's not a matter of first vs rest but observation that
| input while the page is loading is, often, where most of
| the egregious delays happen: the browser is busy
| parsing+executing oodles of script, sites don't chunk
| script execution and yield to the browser to process input,
| etc. As a result, we have FID, which is a diagnostic metric
| for this particular (painful) user experience problem on
| the web today.
|
| Note that Event Timing API captures _all_ input:
| https://github.com/WICG/event-timing. First input is just a
| special case we want to draw attention to due to the
| reasons I outlined above. That said, we encourage everyone
| to track all input delays on their site, and it's
| definitely a focus area for future versions of Core Web
| Vitals -- we want to make sure users have predictable,
| fast, response latency on the web.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| > where's the literature on how those affect user satisfaction?
|
| As someone else mentioned, it seems like all the issues you
| mentioned ultimately create user dissatisfaction because of
| input delay. In which case FID seems like it'd be a good metric
| for you to target. I'm not sure about the claim that if you
| improve FID then all input delay will be reduced for the entire
| duration of a person's session with your site, but I imagine
| that FID and general input delay are directly correlated. This
| is just conjecture however and is not a statement backed by
| research.
|
| Here's a summary of some general research on how users perceive
| input delay:
| https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/r...
|
| (Tangentially related) The new performance.measureMemory() API
| may help you correlate memory leaks with business metrics:
| https://web.dev/monitor-total-page-memory-usage/
| superkuh wrote:
| Your site is already unhealthy no matter what because it's _not
| a website_. It 's an application that just happens to also use
| http and browsers.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _If you require executing javascript to display things you
| 've already lost and your site is already unhealthy no matter
| what because it's not a website._
|
| That ship has sailed, nobody cares if it's not a "website" as
| in HTTP only, including 99% of users...
| henriquez wrote:
| You say "nobody cares," but I and many people I know and
| work with do care! I understand your point of view but
| maybe you should try to understand where others are coming
| from.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > I understand your point of view but maybe you should
| try to understand where others are coming from.
|
| Can you make an argument for it? It kind of feels like a
| movie critic trying to explain why the Transformers are
| bad, even though they still rake in billions. If the
| Transformers changed to make the critic happy, it at best
| would have no impact on the billions, in all likelihood
| it would cause a regression, and so the critic needs an
| incredibly compelling argument.
| henriquez wrote:
| I wrote a (lengthy) post on this:
| https://www.obsessivefacts.com/blog/2020-04-04-the-
| javascrip...
|
| In the language of your analogy it would be "Transformers
| are unethical!" Our collective obsession with making
| billions is ruining entertainment media / the Internet /
| everything unfettered capitalism touches ;)
| LunaSea wrote:
| But you are entering the realm of philosophy not reality.
|
| Fact is, applications and websites mostly exist for
| commerce.
| seph-reed wrote:
| > the critic needs an incredibly compelling argument
|
| Popularity is a B.S. metric of correctness, quality, or
| pretty much anything other than zeitgeist.
|
| It blows my mind that people still argue there is
| causality between quality and popularity. Certainly,
| there's correlation sometimes, but something does not
| need to be quality to be popular, nor is quality always
| popular. I mean, Van Gogh wasn't recognized until death.
| And you saw the 2016 US elections right?
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > Popularity is a B.S. metric of correctness, quality, or
| pretty much anything other than zeitgeist.
|
| In the case of transformers it's also a measure of money
| made, which, being incredibly pragmatic here, is also the
| point of most website people are paid to work on.
|
| I'm not trying to say that all other measures don't have
| value or anything like that, I'm just trying to be
| practical in terms of the needs and goals of most modern
| websites. I'd much prefer every website was made "right",
| but "right" is nebulous and expensive.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Popularity is a B.S. metric of correctness, quality,
| or pretty much anything other than zeitgeist. It blows my
| mind that people still argue there is causality between
| quality and popularity._
|
| Yes, but "quality" is a fuzzy and personal metric in many
| domains...
|
| Or conversely, "quality" can be defined as "popular with
| the critic type" in these domains - so it's still just a
| kind of popularity metric...
| seph-reed wrote:
| Eh. I think you're intentionally making things fuzzy.
|
| If you have a bunch of Bowerbird watching the movie, it
| better have the color blue to be popular with them. We
| can reduce their "shit-test" list to something simple
| which obviously overlaps minimally with what is a
| reasonable definition for quality.
|
| I'll yield that the Transformer movies do have phenomenal
| CGI, and that people who like them are in fact discerning
| of the quality within that. But this is just one
| dimension of "quality," and I highly doubt the critic is
| unaware of it.
|
| The truth is that modern popularity is based off a narrow
| subset of shit-tests which are easily duped (Trump
| passed). Meanwhile there are many critics who aim to have
| a much broader and accurate shit-testing system. Some of
| them get up their own ass about trying to be above common
| shit-tests, and in the process they debase critics as a
| whole. All shit-tests matter.
|
| But the point is that most people are really, really
| easily hackable and calling something that gets through
| their defenses a "quality hack" is lame. It's like
| hacking peoples wordpress sites from 2000.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _The truth is that modern popularity is based off a
| narrow subset of shit-tests which are easily duped (Trump
| passed)._
|
| I don't think quality, or, for that matter, political
| choices (as in your example), are that simple to judge.
|
| E.g. Trump might have won, but not necessarily because
| people were "duped", but because they was not much better
| on offer -- it was either a Rob Schneider fart movie
| (Trump), or a pretentious emotionally-dead tone-deaf to
| many issues Hollywood oscar-bait (Hillary).
| seph-reed wrote:
| > I don't think quality, or, for that matter, political
| choices (as in your example), are that simple to judge.
|
| Of course not. Every judgement is ultimately a failed
| attempt at omnipotence. But we try anyways, and there is
| such thing as progress. We can get closer, especially
| relative to each-other.
|
| There's a great joke that the only probabilities humans
| believe in are 0%, 100%, and 50%. Basically anything that
| isn't certain is likely going to be treated like 50% by
| most people. It seems to be central in "equality of
| opinions," or "my ignorance is just as good as your
| knowledge."
|
| To summarize, I think the following is a fun reductio-ad-
| absurdum argument, but ultimately not true: "There is no
| 100% accurate way of measuring quality, therefor all
| means of measurement are equally meaningless."
|
| If it was true, there would be no point in symbols or
| abstractions of any sort.
| Jaygles wrote:
| I think those metrics aren't brought up as much in the
| blogosphere because they are harder to measure. Those metrics
| will be unique to the context of the app they're measured in.
| The metrics talked about in the article are ones that can be
| determined easily in the context that Chromium is working in.
| speedgoose wrote:
| The images are cut on mobile.
| masswerk wrote:
| Ironically, the page took more than a minute until first paint on
| an old iPad. (I even restarted the poor thing, thinking the HTTP
| stack had somehow died.) Please, mind that not everything is
| evergreen and that there's not much reason from a user's
| perspective to put perfectly working equipment to scrap just
| because devs decide to go with newest standards only. (Think
| green computing, which includes electronics waste. This also
| works both ways: a robust implementation is more likely to work
| in a few years from now on a then newer, probably much different
| browser engine.)
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