Google announced that starting in May 2021, it will be using core web vitals as part of its website ranking criteria, which include Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and First Input Delay (FID). Data scraping is a great tool to learn your web vitals information, so you aren’t surprised.   

Web vitals are new criteria that Google added to the existing ranking info. The change will affect the best practices for search engine optimization. 

If you want to keep your SEO level high, you will need to know how to get your web vitals using web scraping to see what you have to improve. 

What are Web Vitals 

You have heard of the new Google core web vitals, but do you understand what they mean? Each one is a specific metric that you can control. Understanding how they work is essential to optimize these vitals to get your best web ranking score. 

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

LCP measures the time it takes to load the most prominent picture, video, or text block on the page’s viewing area. If it takes too long, users may get bored and leave your site.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

CLS is the shift created as a web page loads all of its information. It is caused by new features loading and shifting the view frame of the page. It can cause users to be distracted, misclick on options, and lose their place while reading. 

First Input Delay (FID)

FID measures the time it takes the website to accept and respond to users’ input correctly. If your site takes too long to respond, it can frustrate your users and make it annoying to interact with your page. 

How Can Data Scraping Report Your Vitals? 

Data scraping allows you to gather information on your website over repeated attempts. Then it can compile these results and give you a report that you can use to understand the average stats for your vitals. 

You can set the data you want to extract so that it focuses on the site’s vitals. Since you are likely using your own site, you don’t have to worry about scraper blocks. You can use your scraper to get a lot of data on your vitals so you can see how they react over a period of time. 

You can also study all of your data to find what items are causing the most problems so you can find what you have to fix. 

Data Scrapers That Can Help You Out 

There are plenty of web scrapers out there that you can use to gather data on your website vitals. These premade scrapers include Scraping Bee, Screaming Frog, and many others to collect data on your site. The good thing about these options is that they are quick and easy to use. 

However, you can’t customize these scrappers as much, and they are going to cost you money to use. If you want more control and have decent computer skills, you can make a scraper. With a little extra time, you can save some money and still use a scraper.  

Creating Your Own Data Scraper 

There are many different web scrapers that you can create to help you test your website’s core vitals. One of the most straightforward and most useful options is a java based web scraper that you can customize to gather any information you want to discover. 

There are tutorials to help you create a scraper that can gather all this information and get you the data you need to optimize your web vitals and improve your SEO. You will want to select the page elements to give you the information on your page’s vitals. 

Maximizing Your Web Vitals 

Each of your Google core values has an acceptable range that you want to aim for after checking your page. The better your times are for each of these stats, the higher your page will rank. 

There are simple solutions for each of these that will help you make the times better. Most of these are small corrections that don’t take a lot of work to institute.  

Maximizing LCP

You need an LCP time of 2.5 secs or less to fall into the passing range. Increasing overall page load speed will help you with this. Using the proper image size and file type will help with the stat. So will compressing your website’s information whenever possible. 

Other things you need to consider when with your LCP is slow server response, render-blocking CSS and Javascript, slow resource load times, and client-side rendering. These are all problems that you may have to address to maximize speeds.

Maximizing CLS

To get a passing CLS grade, you have to have a time of .1 seconds. There are a lot of things that can affect your shifts. Images, ads, embeds, and iframes without dimensions can all hurt it. 

To fix these problems, you want to ensure that all images have defined dimensions, either set or scaled, will work. You also want to have ads with a dedicated space that won’t change depending on what loads. 

For some of these problems, it can be a little harder. Embeds can change size dramatically, but you can assign specific space for them to decrease shifts.  

Maximizing FID

FID is one of the challenging web vitals to test. You want to get an average speed of 100 MS to reach your highest page rank. To get your best times for this, make sure to break up long tasks, optimize your page for interaction readiness, use a web worker, and Reduce JavaScript execution time. 

Final Thoughts on Data Scraping for Web Vitals  

Whether you build your own web scraping tool or you use a premade one, data scraping your site can yield you a ton of useful information about your web vitals. 

Once you have the information, you can maximize your web vitals to have your best possible page ranking on Google and many other search engines. Using this data will allow you to enhance your scores and improve your site’s SEO.

Citation 

Walton, P. (2020, July 21). Web Vitals. Web.Dev. https://web.dev/vitals/

Google. (2020, May 28). Evaluating page experience for a better web. Google Developers. https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience

Screaming Frog. (2021, February 17). How To Audit Core Web Vitals. https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/how-to-audit-core-web-vitals/

Google. (2020b, November 10). Timing for bringing page experience to Google Search. Google Developers. https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/11/timing-for-page-experience