Is Your Website Google Compliant?

We’ve created a free resource for you with weekly updates to determine how compliant your website is with Google’s page speed measures.

Websites with low scores could well be penalised in the search results as Google begins to emphasise fast sites that offer a better user experience, even more than before.

If your site is not performing as well as your competitors, you could lose valuable revenue this year with a drop in the search rankings.

We’ve analysed the websites of the top 200 law firms and presented the data below so you can see how you compare.

If you’re not in the top 200 firms but want to see your scores, you can add your website to our database – see below for details.

The data we collect each week from Google is through an API we’ve built to track the top 200 UK law firm’s website performance against the core web vital data – which Google has said will affect rankings when they roll out the new algorithm starting in May 2021.

The key metrics in our report are as follows:

FCP – First Contentful Paint , while not strictly a ‘core’ web vital, is the time taken for the first piece of content to render in the browser, so is the perception of site speed for the user, and should be less than 2 seconds.

LCP – Largest Contentful Paint is a core web vital that is the measure of the site loading performance, and a good score is quicker than 2.5 seconds.

FID – First Input Delay is a core web vital that indicates the time between a user first interacting with the site and when the browser actually responds to that interaction. Good scores here should be under 100 milliseconds.

CLS – Cumulative Layout Shift is the third core web vital and measures the visual stability of the page – a good score of less than 0.1 shows a page that doesn’t keep shifting about as it loads.

Want to know how to improve your scores?

Page Speed Is A Major Ranking Factor.

Google increased the emphasis on page experience in 2021.  If your website is still not compliant with this Google update, you could lose out on your rankings but not only that, a poor user experience leads to users finding their information elsewhere.

What this means for the bottom line:

  • When pages take longer to load, the number of people ‘bouncing’ off the page (leaving your website) increases.
  • When the page takes longer to load your conversion rate drops – so you get less people making an enquiry.
  • When Google sees a poor page experience score and high bounce rates, it will drop your page down the rankings in favour of better performing pages.

All these aspects mean you will lose revenue from your site, and your competitors with better performing pages will benefit as a result – a double whammy.

If you’re not already focusing on improving your page speed and user experience, then you need to start today.

We can help!

We offer a page speed optimisation service for your WordPress website.

If you’re not already on the WordPress CMS platform then we can easily migrate your website to WordPress and improve your site speed and user experience metrics.

When your site performance is improved, you get more visitors, more enquiries, and more new clients.  With many of the traditional business development activities difficult in a post-Covid world, making more of your website could be the answer.

How to get fast websites

It *is* possible to get incredible scores in Google’s page speed insights report – we’ve done it with our website as proof:

Legmark Page Speed Insights

This is the desktop score for the homepage while the mobile score hovers around 94-99 out of 100.

Notes on the data:

Data is the ‘Lab Data’ from Google – this is generated through simulated 3G connections to your site by Google.

Websites with lots of visitors may also see ‘field data’ in Google’s Page Speed Insights report, this is tracking actual visitors to your website who most likely are on faster connections than 3G so the data may be slightly different.

Not all websites have enough traffic to return field data so we use lab data for our report.

Data is collected weekly from Google’s Lighthouse platform using Legmark’s proprietary custom API.  Scores can fluctuate based on a number of factors including:

  • A/B tests or changes in ads being served
  • Internet traffic routing changes
  • Testing on different devices, such as a high-performance desktop and a low-performance laptop
  • Browser extensions that inject JavaScript and add/modify network requests
  • Antivirus software

All the data contained here should be used as a guide and in conjunction with other data sources to inform your strategy.  Legmark is not responsible for the data or the impact of the data on your website performance.

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