Using Data for Good: The Web Vitals Index
RapidSpike is committed to revolutionising website reliability, performance, and security — to make the web faster, safer, and easier for everyone to use. With the direct correlation between website speed and conversion now widely acknowledged, even marginal gains of 0.1% could represent millions of extra revenue for the UK’s largest brands.
The Web Vitals Index is the ‘Champions League’ of ecommerce websites, and was created to make use of the powerful RapidSpike data that reveals the highest-performing eCommerce websites in the UK and Europe. RapidSpike’s goal is to demonstrate the brands working the hardest — irrespective of size — to improve overall website performance, brand loyalty and user experiences for every online customer.
The Web Vitals Index triangulates a range of metrics including Google’s Core Web Vitals three-pronged user experience benchmark, as well as website performance, accessibility, page structure, and reliability. These are collected from billions of data points taken every minute of every day including 3rd party suppliers, network and server information, API calls and more. Once scored, the brands can benchmark themselves against competitors and take proactive steps to improve their score.
Initially focused on the UK and European retail sector, ongoing iterations of the Index will widen the reach to include global eCommerce brands.
Challenges
One of the main challenges faced for the Web Vitals Index was surrounding data input. RapidSpike monitors over 8,000 global websites. To set up monitoring tests for each website takes approximately 5 minutes.
It was decided to create a ‘Setup Wizard’ to make data input easier. The top retail websites were researched and added to the monitoring index reducing the data input time to 20 seconds per website. This is now released as a feature for clients to use when adding websites to their RapidSpike account.
Another challenge was deciding how the scores are weighted correctly. To do this, an Index Score calculator was created and uses different weightings to standardise these metrics then sum them into one single score. The weights were thoroughly researched and determined by in-house performance experts as well as industry statistics from external web performance leaders including Google.
The Web Vitals Index scores are made up of various performance, accessibility and reliability factors including:
- Lighthouse Scores – A Google Lighthouse test returns Performance, Accessibility, SEO, and Best Practices scores.
- Web Vitals Scores – Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics used to measure the user experience stages of a web page. They include Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
- Uptime Scores – An uptime test checks website uptime percentage.
These scores are each averaged once a week for the previous 7 days. Scores are weighted based on importance which in turn shows an overall Web Vitals Index Score. Getting the scores to be as accurate as possible was important to the team to help companies make informed decisions on how to improve their score.
Making a Difference
The Web Vitals Index has fostered several professional relationships, including helping Neilson Rank in the Top 10 Global Travel websites and improved performance scores by 16%.
One of the project’s creative campaigns centred around the World Cup team’s websites. The results included Serbia in top spot with a score of 89.2 overall. Commenting on the campaign Gav Winter said: “Once again, the rankings prove that website performance doesn’t always correlate with the marketplace presence, popularity or wider commercial power of an organisation.”
To celebrate those at the top, badges were made to champion websites which they can use on their own website.
Every conversion counts. So, RapidSpike turns noisy website performance data into useful, visual and commercially-focused insight that helps prioritise seemingly competing actions according to a brand’s ecommerce KPIs. Regardless of technical knowledge, the platform empowers all users to have next-level conversations with their tech team/suppliers, regarding how good their website could be and even marginal gains could have on revenue and reputation.
Consumers also benefit from the data provided in the Web Vitals Index. Understanding which websites perform the best, means consumers can make informed decisions on where they decide to shop, book flights or place a bet.
This is just the start of how RapidSpike aims to use data for good. RapidSpike wants to celebrate businesses at the top of their game for both website performance and sustainability and will be rewarded for their efforts in an independent accreditation scheme.
Join the Web Vitals Index today to see where your website ranks for Performance, Core Web Vitals and Uptime in relation to the biggest websites in the UK and Europe.
