Google PageSpeed Insights: Does It Matter Anymore?

Google PageSpeed Insights is a free-of-cost tool that suggests the speed and optimization of the website in consideration. To get started, you only require to enter the URL of your site and click “Analyze”. Within 60 seconds, this tool will generate a detailed analysis report of your site’s speed, performance, SEO, and accessibility along with some recommendation about your site status and ways for its better ranking.

Importance of Google PageSpeed Insights

The Google Page Speed stats are more than mere numbers. They are a vital aspect that controls the ease of use and the website’s optimization for search engines. Thus, as per Google’s standards, faster sites are preferred as they rank higher. Google also confirms that the impact of one second delay in site speed is substandard, to the extent that it can cut conversion rates by up to 7%. Slow loading websites scare the visitors away, thus increasing the bounce rates, reduces the traffic and hence lowers the revenue.

How to Use Google PageSpeed Insights

This is really a simple process. All you need to do is enter your website’s URL and this tool will audit its details. Within a couple of seconds, a detailed report will appear displaying your site’s optimum speed on desktop as well as a mobile. The score range is between 0-100. The higher the scores, the better will be your site’s performance.

Understanding the Google PageSpeed Insights Report

The report is divided into several sections:

1. Performance – Overall performance and functioning of your website
2. Accessibility – Checks and highlights any barriers between your website and global traffic
3. Best Practices – A summary of the overall best practices that your sight might be implementing
4. SEO – Search Engine Optimization score for your website

Deep Dive into the Reports

One of the major reasons why Google PageSpeed Insights stands out among its competitors is its extensive and comprehensive reports based on the 4 major factors mentioned above. Below is the overview of stats of a website www.nytimes.com on a desktop:

Let’s see the stats included in these 4 factors:

Performance

The performance score is based on following metrics

1. First Contentful Paint (FCP): The amount of time taken to render the first image or text.
2. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The time at which the largest text or image is painted.
3. Total Blocking Time (TBT): The total duration of a page being unresponsive to user input, such as mouse clicks, screen taps, or keyboard presses.
4. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): A score to measure largest layout shift that occurs during the entire life cycle of a page.
5. Speed Index: Time taken to visually display the content when during page load expressed in seconds.

In this case, as you can see, the performance score is 24 out of 100. The performance is calculated using a special tool called the Lighthouse Scoring Calculator.

It should be noted that this test was performed with custom throttling enabled which can be seen in the image. Now what does throttling mean here? The answer is simple, the Lighthouse is trying to mimic the older devices not only on the network level but the Lighthouse also throttles the CPU. Now the question arises why its trying to mimic the older devices and not the newer ones? Again the answer is simple for maximum compatibility. However, if you are confident that your audience will be using newer devices and faster internet connections then some audit points of Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights can be ignored but not all.

Regardless of Google PageSpeed Insights throttling you should try your best to improve performance score as much as you possibly can. Try improving following factors improve overall performance of your website:

1. Image Optimization.
2. Defer off-screen images.
3. Less Redirects.
4. Improve Time To First Byte (Server Response Time)
5. Serve your resources with compression (to reduce bandwidth consumption and optimize delivery).
6. Serve Content over HTTP/2.
7. Minifying CSS & JS files.
8. Reduced Number of Requests.
9. Leverage Efficient Browser Caching.
10. Reduced JavaScript Execution Time.
11. Consider using CDN for static resources.
12. Remove Unused CSS & JSS.
13. Try Minimizing main-thread work.

Accessibility

The accessibility score measures how easy it is for users with disabilities to navigate and understand your webpage. It analyzes your website’s code for common accessibility issues. Google PageSpeed Insights looks for elements like missing alt text for images, insufficient color contrast, and unclear heading structures. Fixing these issues makes your website usable for people with visual impairments, motor limitations, cognitive disabilities, and more. It should be noted that the Google PageSpeed Insights automated testing can only detect a subset of issues and does not guarantee the accessibility of your web app even if it scores 100/100 percent. So Google PageSpeed Insights encourages its users to manually test their web apps to be on the safe side.

Best Practices

Best Practices score in Google PageSpeed Insights is Google’s way of telling you how qualitative your code is by analyzing your site for the following factors:

1. Avoid using deprecated APIs.
2. Avoid using third-party cookies.
3. Errors logs in browser console.
4. Issues logged in the Issues panel in Chrome Devtools.
5. Missing source maps for large first-party JavaScript.
6. Strong Content Security Policy and its effectiveness against XSS attacks.
7. Redirects HTTP traffic to HTTPS.
8. Usage of legible font sizes in the document.

SEO

Simply, this report shows whether or not your website is following all the necessary parameters to maintain the On-Page SEO of your website. Without on-page search engine optimization, it is nearly impossible for a website to be even recognized by a search engine, let alone ranking high on the first page. In this example, the SEO score is 92 out of hundred after 9 audits. This indicates that this website is following all the SEO standards required to rank better on Google.

PageSpeed Optimization for a Diverse Range of Users

Further, PageSpeed Insights not only considers the mobile-page performance but also it takes into account the desktop performance as well, which is very crucial if the website targets the both worlds i. e., mobile users as well as the computer/laptop users. This kind of performance audit assesses the real-world data derived from the Chrome User Experience Report and provides developers with data on real-life experience.

How Accurate are the Google PageSpeed Insights?

The accuracy of Google PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse is subject to debate. It tries to guide business owners, developers, and SEO specialists to make their sites faster for legacy devices on obsolete networks while following the best standards and practices allowing your website to reach a wider audience.

Since Google PageSpeed Insights is just a generic one of many automated testing tools its ability to accurately measure your site’s Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and On-Page SEO is severely limited. So Google PageSpeed Insights users are encouraged to perform manual testing. The overall web page quality doesn’t just depend on these 4 factors and many other things must be taken into account. Google PageSpeed Insight stats should be taken with a grain of salt and if you still don’t believe it then you can check Google’s own one of the largest and most popular video streaming website scores on www.youtube.com.

People forget to note that this score is for a single page and does not reflect the performance score of the entire website. Which means each page of your website may have a different score. So you will have to measure each page separately.

Google PageSpeed Insights in Today’s Fast Digital Landscape

Undoubtedly, a fast, highly optimized and well-maintained website leaves a strong impact on the users’ decision to make a purchase. A slow site will demoralize visitors, this will thus result to high bounce rates and low engagement rates. Despite Google PageSpeed Insights shortcomings, this tool gives a remarkable insight into several basic areas related to performance, including load time, Time to Interactive, and First Contentful Paint.

PageSpeed Insights helps developers identify general areas for optimization that help developers and business owners run a quick test to see if the web page performance good or not. Since it lacks custom parameters, criteria, and specialized performance testing tools it won’t be able to correctly identify issues and you might see inaccurate results specially if it’s a complex web app.

Wrapping things up

Though an effective free tool for small websites, Google PageSpeed Insight is far from being a comprehensive tool. It does not guarantee SEO ranking, it does not reduce bounce rate nor does it always increase the site speed in reality. It should only be used for portfolio websites and small e-commerce websites. Complex apps should always be tested using specialized testing tools by experts.