Google has just unveiled an exciting new tool—CrUX Vis—designed to make monitoring website performance metrics easier than ever. This experimental tool allows users to visualize data from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) History API, providing a real-time snapshot of how real users experience your website. In this post, we’ll dive into what this new tool offers, why it’s a game changer for web performance analysis, and how you can start using it today.
What Is CrUX Vis?
CrUX Vis is Google’s latest experiment to help web developers, SEO specialists, and business owners gain insights into their website’s Core Web Vitals performance. For over a year, the CrUX History API has provided access to historical performance data, but until now, visualizing that data required third-party tools or complex BigQuery queries. CrUX Vis simplifies this process by providing an intuitive interface that makes it easy to track your website’s performance over time.
Created as part of a summer internship project by Jamison O’Keefe, CrUX Vis is intended to eventually replace the existing CrUX Dashboard and offer faster, more responsive performance tracking.
Key Features
CrUX Vis comes with a number of useful features that make it a powerful tool for monitoring and improving web performance:
- Historical Performance Data Visualization: The tool allows you to visualize your Core Web Vitals (Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and Interaction to Next Paint) over the last 25 weeks. This makes it easier to track long-term trends in your site’s performance.
- Real-Time Lookups with Weekly Updates: While older CrUX data sources like BigQuery were limited to monthly data, CrUX Vis provides weekly updates, allowing you to monitor changes more frequently. This is especially useful if you’ve recently implemented website improvements and want to see the impact faster.
- User-Friendly Interface: Gone are the days of working with complex queries or slow dashboards. Simply enter your website’s URL, hit enter, and get an instant visual overview of how your website is performing on key metrics.
- URL-Level and Origin-Level Data: It allows you to view performance data both for your entire domain (origin) and for individual URLs. This is useful for identifying which pages on your site need the most attention.
- Device-Specific Data: The tool offers filtering options to display data for desktop or mobile visitors separately. You can also view what percentage of your traffic comes from mobile devices, helping you optimize based on how users are accessing your site.
How Does CrUX Vis Compare to Other Tools?
Before CrUX Vis, accessing CrUX data required either using BigQuery or the CrUX Dashboard, which—while useful—could be slow and difficult to navigate. The CrUX History API, introduced over a year ago, addressed many of these issues by offering a more performant, real-time data source. However, visualizing this data still required third-party tools.
This new tool builds on the CrUX History API to provide a native, easy-to-use interface for accessing and exploring your website’s historical performance data. With its fast real-time lookups and weekly updates, it significantly improves upon the older CrUX Dashboard.
Google intends to eventually replace the CrUX Dashboard entirely, providing a more streamlined and effective tool for performance tracking.
How to Use CrUX Vis
Using CrUX Vis is incredibly simple:
- Go to cruxvis.withgoogle.com
- Enter your website’s URL in the search field.
- Hit Enter and view your results!
You’ll be presented with a timeline of your website’s performance on Core Web Vitals, alongside detailed breakdowns for Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Interaction to Next Paint (INP). You can further filter the data by device type (desktop or mobile) or view specific time ranges to focus on recent changes or longer-term trends.
Note: CrUX data is only available for websites that receive enough traffic. If your site doesn’t meet the minimum traffic threshold, you’ll see a message stating that “CrUX data is not available” for your URL. Google collects this data from real Chrome users, so smaller or less frequently visited websites may not have enough data to display performance metrics.
Why CrUX Vis Matters for Website Optimization
As Google continues to emphasize Core Web Vitals as ranking factors in search results, tools like CrUX Vis are becoming essential for maintaining strong web performance. By providing easy access to real-world user data, CrUX Vis allows you to:
- Identify performance bottlenecks, such as slow loading times (LCP) or unstable page elements (CLS).
- Track the impact of website changes, allowing you to see whether recent optimizations are improving your Core Web Vitals scores.
- Focus on specific URLs or device types to fine-tune your website for a better user experience.
Conclusion
CrUX Vis is a valuable addition to Google’s web performance toolbox. With its real-time lookups, user-friendly interface, and detailed historical data, it’s never been easier to understand how users experience your website. Whether you’re a developer, marketer, or business owner, CrUX Vis offers the insights you need to make informed decisions about optimizing your site’s performance.
Note: Read our article about Chrome User Experience Report:
