Core Web Vitals Means Deciding What Add-ons are Necessary

Google’s Martin Splitt discussed the value of being flexible enough to replacing a plugin or add-on if it cannot be adapted to scoring better in core web vitals.

“If someone is in a situation where they’re using various different tools, add-ons, apps and plugins to make their user experience “better” or upsell the user or whatever it is and those tools aren’t making the changes… and they can’t implement them differently… should they be looking at different solutions?”

Martin Splitt answered:

“I guess looking at different solutions is definitely a good idea.”

Martin next made the analogy of owning a car with very good gas mileage that had a flaw in that it tended to crash every couple of months.

Screenshot of Loren Baker, a Founder of Search Engine Journal

Loren Baker asking Martin an amusing question.

Loren asked:

“The Tesla analogy?”

Martin Splitt paused a second then responded:

“No…“

Screenshot of Martin Splitt Playfully Responding With a No

Google’s Martin Splitt playfully denies that he just made a Tesla analogy crashing

They both chuckled about the joke and moved on with the discussion.

Martin continued:

“If it gives you more stuff that potentially is great but it has these implications… you have to judge for your specific case if you’re okay with the implications that it has or if you’re like nah, I’ll try to see if we have something else that does that without the problems.”

So in other words, if a publisher’s site is slowed down because of a web page feature and the feature cannot be optimized then maybe it’s time to look for another way to accomplish what that feature was doing or simply do without the feature if it’s not really going to be missed.

These web page features can be plugins and apps like chatbots or contact forms that are slowing down rendering.

Loren Baker commented:

“It’s a good chance to look through all of these legacy tools that people have utilized over the years and put together a nice SWOT analysis.

What are the pros and cons? Such and such ups conversion rates or whatever by X percent…

So put together that analysis, right? There are some tools out there… that are alternative players in their spaces that are really marketing the fact that they’re fast, they don’t mess up anything with the page loads and they don’t move things around etc.”

Core Web Vitals May Require Website Technical Analysis

Part of the battle of optimizing is measuring how much impact any plugin or addon has on a site. Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insight give an idea of what the troubling files are.

But at a certain point, optimizing for speed might make publishers think hard about how necessary some addons are to a site because the slower page speed could be working against conversions and rankings.

And that means tossing out everything that’s acting like a dead weight to the site and slowing it down.

Citation

Watch Martin Splitt at 38:15 minute mark