Have you ever done a Web page Speed Test and is it important anyway. Here Peter Hanley explains why it is important and what you can do about it.
Two barrel speed test
It is important these days to consider both desktop and mobile speeds as both are entertained by Google in ranking factors.
To get your mobile speed up to standard you really do need to manage
some of the data with a better selection of inputs
As an example, I just did a test on a post and while it ranked 99/100 for desktop it went down to 76 on mobile.
When I did the Home page with lots more images the mobile went down to about 60 -100. The big factor was off-screen images
0-49 is considered slow 50-89 average and 90+ good as taken from Google page insights.
Now before you go testing the link understand why you are doing it and what result you want to achieve.
Slow sites don’t get opened
Pretty simple stuff really, the site is slow and our impatient mind and fingers just move right on to the next site. Or, perhaps we are on a site and want to open another page and it slowly loads the same thing.
Google and other search engines rate your SEO on many factors and they include open rate and time on site.
Now have a look at your stats
Here are Google Page speed insights
Type in your URL and it will deliver results for Mobile phones. Interesting that Mobile is first and most important in the ranking. This has changed in the last year or so from Desktop. You will see on the page a toggle to also get Desktop results as a comparison.
For those of you who host with Wealthy Affiliate, you have access in your dashboard for increasing and measuring speed. There is, however, nothing you can speed up if you have terrible images and links that throttle you back.
Different sites different measurement
Different sites measure Latency and other issues using different metrics ideas but the results are the same and based in Poor average or good band
and time to load in Msecs
About the PageSpeed Insights API
The PageSpeed Insights API (PSI) reports on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved.
PSI provides both lab and field data about a page. Lab data is useful for debugging performance issues, as it is collected in a controlled environment. However, it may not capture real-world bottlenecks. Field data is useful for capturing true, real-world user experience – but has a more limited set of metrics. See How To Think About Speed Tools for more information on the 2 types of data.
What can you do about page speed?
There are actually quite a few variables but let’s look at the main ones.
First of all from one expert
A cheap web host offering monthly plans for $3.95 complete with unlimited page views and unlimited space might seem like a bargain, but the trade-off is usually slow site speeds and frequent downtime during high traffic periods.
If you want your site to be lightning-fast and ensure your site performs well, you need to invest in a decent web host. If you really want your site to be fast, you may want to look at hosting packages that aren’t on a shared server.
Pictures
The more pictures the slower the speed, pretty easy to believe and add to that using JPeg images over PNG as an example.
Pages that converted visitors contained 38% fewer images than the ones that didn’t. (Click to tweet)
53% of people leave the site if the loading speed is greater than 3 seconds
And believe me that percentage rises quickly over 3 seconds.
Perceived speed
Perceived performance can be described as simply “how fast does your website feel when it loads?” This can be slightly different than how fast your website actually loads. Perceived performance is all from the perspective of the user, not from a website speed test tool. (key CDN)
This is mostly the above the fold content that is seen first on the page.
Lot’s more you can do
In this page, we don’t want to become all too technical and scare you away. If you are a web developer you know this stuff anyway but for us mortals, it is enough to know there can be a problem. We can make a difference with a few basic changes.
I use Wealthy Affiliate web hosting because it contains everything you need to understand on a web page.
It can be yours for free, check how.
In conclusion
Page speed is but one element in SEO. It is, however, a very important element because of the high drop out rate at slow speeds.
