How To Benchmark Website Performance Against Competitors
A fast website provides a good user experience and can help your business win against your competitors. Benchmarking performance lets you see where you stand and whether you're improving.
In this article we'll look at why website benchmarking is important and how to do it.
Why benchmark website performance?
Web performance matters for your business because Google uses it as a ranking factor and faster websites result in better conversion rates.
Google uses the Core Web Vitals to assess your page speed:
- Largest Contentful Paint measures how fast your website loads
- Cumulative Layout Shift measures whether page content shifts around unexpectedly
- Interaction to Next Paint measures how quickly your website responds to user interactions
Doing well on the Core Web Vitals metrics can help you outrank your competitors.
Benchmark Core Web Vitals against your competitors
The data Google uses for rankings comes from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX). You can view this data on DebugBear using the CrUX Trends Dashboard.
Add your competitors to track how you perform in comparison and see whether your site is getting faster or slower over time.
Monitor competitor websites
You can also monitor your competitor websites by running scheduled synthetic tests. Synthetic tests are run by automatically opening a website in a browser. You don't need to install anything on the website, so any publicly available website can be monitored this way.
You can use this to benchmark your homepage as well as specific pages. For example, for an ecommerce site you might want to look at category pages, product pages, and product listing pages.
Click on each monitored page to see a detailed report, including recommendations to optimize the website performance.
Get the data you need to be faster than your competition
Website benchmarking can tell you how your site is doing and whether you need to optimize it to be the best in your industry. A comprehensive monitoring tool like DebugBear can provide insight into what changes you need to make on your website to achieve that.
In addition to CrUX and lab data, DebugBear also supports real user monitoring. This tells you how fast your website is in real time, without the usual 28-day data delay that comes with Google's CrUX dat. You also get in-depth data on how to optimize the Interaction to Next Paint metric.
Monitor Page Speed & Core Web Vitals
DebugBear monitoring includes:
- In-depth Page Speed Reports
- Automated Recommendations
- Real User Analytics Data