And critical intel is only possible by understanding your core web vitals.
What are core web vitals? These are a set of factors that Google takes into account when ranking your website on top. Core web vitals provide critical mission information on your website’s user experience - if they are optimised, then your target audience has a positive user experience, which boosts your SEO.
If core web vitals sound frustratingly complex, here’s a simplified explanation.
The easiest way to understand your core web vitals is to think of them as a sequence of combined objectives of how user-friendly your site is. Get these mission objectives right, and you’ll enjoy a fast, easy-to-browse site that generates consistent clicks and customers.
At Digital Assassin, our WaaS package ensures your core web vitals remain healthy and optimised. We’ll work in the background to identify website failures and improve your scores, keeping your core web vitals always at peak performance.
“I create helpful content full of keywords, why should I care about technical stuff like this?”
This is a common question raised by SMEs. In the past, good content and keywords were a viable strategy because Google’s ranking process looked for high-quality content with relevant keywords that matched a searcher’s desire.
For example, if you sold shoes, your SEO would be foolproof if you had the best content about shoes and if your audience searched for them. At least, that’s how it used to work.
Today, Google doesn’t just demand the best content. It demands websites that load fast, are easy to use, and are free of bugs. Unless your website masters technical SEO, you’ll never make the first page of Google.
And with a frighteningly small 0.78% of people clicking on a result from the second page, that’s a certain mission failure.
Our mercenaries are here with a new mission: to optimise your website's performance and position it at the top of Google. We combine backlinks, local SEO strategies, code optimisation, and core web vitals for an integrated approach to building a killer website.
We’d be concerned if you didn’t have questions about Core Web Vitals. Most SEO agencies would prefer you didn’t know about these crucial ranking factors (because it means they can lock you into long contracts and keep you in the dark). But since we don’t have contracts (we prefer partners, not prisoners), here are your common Core Web Vital questions answered.
Core Web Vitals are Google's measure of real-world page experience — scoring load speed, interactivity, and visual stability. Poor scores directly impact your search rankings. A page that loads slowly, jumps around as it loads, or takes too long to respond will be deprioritised by Google regardless of how good the content is. Technical performance and SEO are inseparable.
Google PageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console's Core Web Vitals report are both free. PageSpeed Insights scores your site for desktop and mobile, identifying specific issues and prioritising fixes by impact. Search Console tracks your Core Web Vitals performance over time across your entire site. Between the two, you have everything needed to diagnose and monitor your page experience scores.
Aim for a green score of 90 or above in Google PageSpeed Insights — particularly on mobile. Google prioritises mobile performance when ranking pages, so if your site loads fast on a phone, desktop will take care of itself. A green mobile score signals to Google that your page delivers a quality experience and deserves to rank.
The biggest culprits are hero images, image carousels, and video — the first elements to load and the most likely to fail. A visitor waiting for an expensive video that never loads will leave before seeing it. Fix these first using WebP images and WebM video, then work through remaining issues flagged in your Core Web Vitals report systematically.
It depends on your starting point. Moving from average to good Core Web Vitals can deliver around 10% improvement in rankings — poor to good can exceed 20%. But performance is one factor among many. Authority, content quality, and keyword competitiveness all play a role. The weaker your Core Web Vitals are right now, the more improvement fixing them will deliver.
It depends on the platform and how poor the scores are. On CoreDNA, fixes are typically minor tweaks — the standardised codebase and modern file format support mean serious Core Web Vitals issues rarely arise. On WordPress, fixing a single page can take two hours or more. The right platform choice eliminates most performance problems before they need fixing.