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Business Value of Google PageSpeed Insights: All you need to know
Business Value of Google PageSpeed Insights: All you need to know

March 25, 2021

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Business Value Of Google Pagespeed Insights

Google PageSpeed is a highly popular tool and a standard for measuring the performance of a website. Ostensibly, it may seem that this tool can just measure the speed of the website but it is a very elaborate tool. While going deep, you may find many technical metrics related to many different aspects of your site. So how can you translate its score from technical to business? We explain everything in this article. After reading this article, you will be able to understand and utilize PageSpeed Insights’ score in this article:

1.       PageSpeed Insights vs. Lighthouse

2.       SEO Impact of Google PageSpeed

3.       UX Impact of Google PageSpeed

4.       There’s No PageSpeed Insights 100/100 Guide

5.       Suggestions for Implementing Google PageSpeed Insights

We will discuss each of these in detail.

 

1. PageSpeed Insights vs. Lighthouse:

Google Pagespeed Insights VS Google Lighthouse

There are many different ways of checking the site performance on Google. You can use PageSpeed Insights, there’s Google Lighthouse on web.dev or you can use Google Lighthouse in Google Chrome. Initially, they appear similar but have unique aspects for considering the correct way to check the speed of your site.

Google Lighthouse is a health evaluation suite for checking the performance, accessibility, practices, and SEO of the site. On web.dev it runs benchmarks on Google servers, while on Google Chrome it runs them locally, so there may be some slight differences. The Google PageSpeed Insights is the performance arm of the Lighthouse which also gives results on Google’s servers too.

Don’t get baffled while choosing between Lighthouse and PageSpeed insights – they are almost the same regarding the loading time of the site.

 

2. SEO Impact of Google PageSpeed:

Now comes a highly important question: how Google PageSpeed can impact the SEO of your site. It is not easy to answer this question. There are multiple reasons for this:

  • It is still not clear how Google exactly measures the SEO performance of the site. PageSpeed Insights is a public tool but they could also be using a different one internally. Also, Google PageSpeed doesn’t include real visitors into account. Also, many SEO experts say that Google uses PageSpeed score for ranking the websites.
  • We know that it affects the SEO but can’t determine up to which extent. The search engine rankings of Google are trade secret and they disclose vague information, nobody knows its reliability. It is also a good thing if Google has disclosed its search algo, then people may have circumvented them and created poor content.
  • Most importantly, Google is the industry leader in automation and machine learning. That their employees are testing AI on their algorithms is all but confirmed. As such, it is not certain that even Google engineers know the working of search engines.

After doing many types of research, we have concluded these assumptions:

  • Everyone likes a fast loading site. Do you know that if a site takes more than 3 seconds to load then 52% of the customers will leave your site and go to the competitor site? Google also prefers a fast loading site to search better on the result pages.
  • Google can evaluate SEO with PageSpeed Insights in any form, and it is always better to be safe and sorry.

With this in mind, you shouldn’t take that number inside the circle as gospel but you should still strive to improve it as far as SEO is concerned. A better score will not always highly impact your business no doubt that it will improve the user experience.

 

3. UX Impact of Google PageSpeed:

Unlike SEO, there is a direct impact of PageSpeed score on the user experience of the site. In today's fast internet world, no one likes to visit a slow loading website, but this tool will go an extra mile. It will not only check whether the page is slow but also checks if it feels clunky as well. There is a Lab Data section in which Google measures all things using certain variables.

lab data pagespeed insights

These variables are used for calculating the score. Google is working constantly to refine them but the general principle doesn’t change a lot. It focuses on:

  • For checking the loading time it checks the First Contentful Paint, Largest Contentful Paint and Time to Interactive
  • Smooth site performance is checked through Speed Index and Total Blocking Time
  • For making sure that page loading doesn’t affect user experience it checks Cumulative Layout Shift.

PageSpeed has a comprehensive set of variables for checking the site speed right away. Their value when determining the score is unequal, though, Google loves tweaking.

You will also find a Field Data section that checks how the page loads for real visitors. It may not affect the score but it is important to review how the site loads for real visitors.

field data pagespeed insights

Google PageSpeed gets this data from the Chrome User Experience Report. The tool will only show this section if the page has sufficient traffic. Pay attention to both the score and the Field data as the number is going to impact your online business. However, don’t overemphasize them.

 

4. There’s No PageSpeed Insights 100/100 Guide

The standards of the PageSpeed tool are extremely high. It focuses on stress testing the site, but doesn't focus on measuring the average performance.

In the current state, the website should get loaded within 3 seconds and interactive in 4 seconds on the mobile for a green ranking. Optimizing the site up to this level is quite difficult.

You don’t need to be surprised if your site doesn’t get a very high ranking. Even very highly professional developers find a lot of obstacles for a perfect score. Don’t look for a 100/100 pagespeed score, instead focus on how you can improve and get an 80+ score.

There is a very strict standard of Field Data by Google. It grades the performance on the basis of the 75th percentile. It represents what fraction of the visitors load the site faster than its data indicates. You must have noticed that the site gets louder faster for most visitors. Thus, if a few of the field data is in the red then it is not a big issue. Providing a rapid quick working site for every visitor is impossible. The local factors which are not in your control also matter a lot.

 

5. Suggestions for Implementing Google PageSpeed Insights:

In the Opportunities and Diagnostics section, you can find several suggestions from the PageSpeed Insights. It checks how your site gets load, takes account of source code, and compares both to the best practices. If your site is already compliant with them, then it will show in the Passed Audits section.


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