Core Web Vitals vs Synthetic Monitoring

Developers should learn and use Core Web Vitals to optimize website performance for better user engagement, higher conversion rates, and improved SEO rankings meets developers should use synthetic monitoring to ensure critical user journeys are functioning correctly and meeting performance benchmarks, especially for e-commerce sites, banking apps, or any service where downtime or slow performance directly impacts revenue or user trust. Here's our take.

Core Web Vitals

Nice Pick

Developers should learn and use Core Web Vitals to optimize website performance for better user engagement, higher conversion rates, and improved SEO rankings

Pros

• They are essential for web development projects where user experience is critical, such as e-commerce sites, content platforms, and progressive web apps
• Related to: web-performance, lighthouse

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

Synthetic Monitoring

Developers should use synthetic monitoring to ensure critical user journeys are functioning correctly and meeting performance benchmarks, especially for e-commerce sites, banking apps, or any service where downtime or slow performance directly impacts revenue or user trust

Pros

• It is essential for pre-production testing, compliance monitoring, and detecting issues in third-party integrations or dependencies that might not be caught by traditional monitoring
• Related to: application-performance-monitoring, real-user-monitoring

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

The Verdict

These tools serve different purposes. Core Web Vitals is a concept while Synthetic Monitoring is a tool. We picked Core Web Vitals based on overall popularity, but your choice depends on what you're building.

The Bottom Line

Core Web Vitals wins

Based on overall popularity. Core Web Vitals is more widely used, but Synthetic Monitoring excels in its own space.