Merging Core Web Vitals, Google Lighthouse, and GA4 Data to Uncover Site Speed Problems

The Challenge

With limited development time, budget, and resources, a focussed web performance roadmap is critical.

Most teams don't have time to spend on work that's "nice to have" or "might move the needle".

To maximize the output of your development team and time, tasks need to be ranked by the highest impact, broadest reach, and simplest to implement.

When development teams undertake a site speed optimization project, many start by analyzing the loading of individual pages using Google's Lighthouse via PageSpeed Insights.

The major challenge here is that a single Lighthouse scan will only hit one page on your website. What if you have thousands of pages?

Teams need to be able to rank the recommendations generated by web performance auditing tools like Lighthouse. To do so many resort to spreadsheets (the second best tool for every job!) to merge disconnected data from Google Analytics, Page Speed Insights, and their synthetic tests.

There's a much better way.

Sensai Puts Lighthouse on Steroids

Sensai runs thousands of scans on your website each week. These scans uncover tens of thousands of corresponding opportunities for improvement.

Of course, many of these suggestions are negligible, tiny inefficiencies, on pages that get little traffic.

Sensai helps you focus only on the truly impactful, pulling the needles from the haystack.

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How Sensai Ranks Site Speed Opportunities

To surface the most important and impactful tasks, Sensai scores performance opportunities across 3 criteria:

• Traffic: How much of your real world user base is affected.
  • For this, anonymous user behaviour data from your Google Analytics 4 (GA4) account is used.
• Impact: How big a difference this will make in your site speed improvement.
  • Little issues that occur on every page can quickly turn into massive opportunities.
• Complexity: How much effort is typically required for this type of task.
  • Ranked as Low, Medium, or High depending on the work required.

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Recompressing images, or not loading unnecessary files are often trivial fixes.

Tearing apart a third party JS bundle to optimize their long tasks is rarely low hanging fruit.

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Drill Into Your Web Performance Data

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Additionally, there are powerful new filters for refining your top tasks:

• Filter fixes by complexity (Low, Med, High)
• Filter by Area of Concern (Rendering vs Interactivity)
• Jump straight from the Dashboard to ranked priorities for your slowest pages.

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Cross-page analysis

Often the same site speed issue is occurring on a group of pages, not just a single URL.

Sensai users have asked for the ability to work backward from performance problems, to the specific pages they're occurring on, which has been added this month.

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Focus Your Effort to Move the Needle

Our new ranking system, powerful filters, and cross-page performance analysis allow developers and product managers to quickly identify where they should be focussing their valuable attention, driven by real user behaviour on-site.

Having a fast website is mandatory for modern digital businesses. Running a rich performance program no longer requires a half-dozen team members, or a million-dollar budget.

Check out Sensai to learn how site speed intelligence can improve your team's effectiveness today.

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