4×100: A Perfect Score According to Google

TLDR

The website falegnameriamuraro.it achieved a perfect score on web.dev/measure/, Google’s “official” tool for analyzing and measuring key aspects of a website. Achieving such high scores is challenging. Even among big corporations, scores of excellence are quite rare. An exception is Zalando, which achieves excellent results (though not yet matching falegnameriamuraro.it). Are these measurements important? Yes, because their results have a positive correlation with business revenue.

Google’s web.dev/measure Measures and Assigns Scores

In the realm of web design and web development, there is a plethora of tools for measuring and evaluating websites across various aspects.

One of these tools is web.dev/measure, and it’s particularly significant, if nothing else, because it’s Google’s official tool. Google’s evaluations are highly relevant and have significant consequences: consider its power to make a site and its content extremely popular or, conversely, relegate them to obscurity.

This tool is accessible to everyone absolutely freely and at no cost: anyone can analyze their own site or that of their competitors by simply inputting the site’s URL into the designated field.

Whether you like it or not (spoiler: we don’t), the measurements Google makes of your site should interest you nearly as much as your LDL cholesterol values in your blood.

The aspects considered and measured by web.dev/measure are four:

Performance
(speed and quality of navigation)

Accessibility
(ease of access to the site for users with limitations or disabilities)

Best Practices
(security and user experience)

S.E.O.
(factors influencing positioning)

4×100 for falegnameriamuraro.it

With the redesign of Falegnameria Muraro’s website, we managed to achieve the perfect score:

Note: this measurement was taken on 27/09/2021 and may change over time, as Google periodically modifies and updates its criteria. This means that scores can change over time and generally worsen, as judgment criteria become increasingly strict and restrictive over months and years. Furthermore, these measurements are subject to a certain “physiological” degree of fluctuation, especially regarding the performance aspect. For example, conducting multiple successive measurements of the falegnameriamuraro.it site reveals that the performance aspect, as of today, 27/09/2021, alternates between values of 100 and 99, with even some rare instances of 98 (of course, fluctuations beyond 100 cannot be indicated, as the measurement scale has been reached). In these successive measurements, the site remains unchanged, and the variation in performance is due to the server’s response speed, which at any given moment may be managing different workloads. During high workloads, performance can be negatively affected. Lower-quality hosting services that are inadequately dimensioned are subject to far wider downward fluctuations.

In general terms, achieving any goal becomes significant only to the extent that challenges exist. If the majority of sites on the web consistently achieved values close to 100, there would be no sense in boasting talking about it here.

The truth is that most sites on the web today are far from achieving the highest values, especially in the performance dimension (for more on this, see The Importance of Having a Fast Website and Guide to Google Page Experience and Core Web Vitals).

Examples of Results from Well-Known Company Websites

We believe that to contextualize the situation, it’s now appropriate to provide an overview of the evaluations that various sites on the web can receive, just to give a rough idea. Let’s start with the four most successful Formula 1 teams in history, who should know about performance and speed.

Someone might argue that Ferrari would sell even without a website, so it’s not important for them. No one with a vague understanding of the marketing function of a company can hold such an opinion, but we fear that convictions of this kind are unfortunately still widespread (a pat on the back to marketers who have to deal with and fight these notions daily). Let’s now look at the evaluations of companies more tied to the web, which without the web would be entirely different or might not even exist:

What can be gleaned from this brief overview is that achieving the highest scores is not easy, even for Big Corps. It requires, first and foremost, an awareness of the importance of these aspects, and then their extreme consideration in every aspect and phase of a website’s lifecycle, from its conception, to the choice of technological stack, to its decommissioning and replacement due to obsolescence.

At Zalando, they measured well, did calculations, and figured out that reducing the average page load time by 100ms has a positive impact on the average order value by +0.7%.

0.7% seems small? Let’s put it differently: by reducing the load time by a second, the average order value increases by 197%, essentially doubles. It’s the same thing, but this way it gives a better idea.

When you can translate performance into money, it’s likely easier to make them a business priority. And this is likely what happened at Zalando:

To conclude the picture, we must say that results like these are more unique than rare, and Zalando’s site is still a rarity. And precisely because of this, it’s an example to be imitated as soon as possible, while it’s still an opportunity, a potential competitive advantage over competitors, and before it becomes an unavoidable necessity.

The Only Thing that Matters is that the Website Generates Conversions

For any corporate website, the main goal is to capture visitors’ attention, encourage them to learn more, and ultimately lead them to complete an online purchase or get in touch with the company. In this sense, how significant is it whether the site achieves a good score in Google’s evaluations? Are they perhaps just another set of vanity metrics that don’t contribute to business revenue?

The answer to this question lies in the correlation between a site’s adequacy in terms of Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, S.E.O., and its actual ability to generate conversions and thus contribute to achieving business objectives.

A visitor is unlikely to convert on a site that:

• they can’t even find (S.E.O. inadequacy)
• they don’t trust to visit because it’s marked as “not secure” (Best Practices inadequacy)
• they can’t visit (Accessibility inadequacy)
• they abandon because it’s too slow (Performance inadequacy).

It’s not a binary issue (on or off), but each of these dimensions represents a continuum ranging from poor to excellent or, according to Google’s measurement, from zero to one hundred. And improving a site in these aspects increases the likelihood of user conversions.

So no, we don’t believe these are vanity metrics, quite the opposite. They are parameters that have a significant impact on business revenue and that entrepreneurs and managers should monitor with the same attention they usually give to the sales force.

And your site? What values does your site achieve? Why not measure them now on web.dev/measure?
And if you don’t like the results and would like to discuss them with someone who has been working on these topics for years, we invite you to write to web@antartika.it or call +39 0444 401538.