Page Speed – What’s That All About Then?

While often confused with website speed, page speed is the measurement of how fast the content of your page loads. There are two types of measurement which are taken into account:

1. Page Load Time – The time it takes for full content to display on your page

2. Time to First Byte – How long it takes for the browser to receive the first piece of information from the web server

Google provides a free tool that tests your page speed and suggests ways that your page speed can be improved called PageSpeed Insights, powered by Lighthouse an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages.  There are also many other performance review tools available online. We have used some well known websites to provide examples of some of the most popular below:

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What we can see from testing some popular websites is that the performance scores can vary greatly depending on the chosen method for testing. You can also notice that the GTMetrix PageSpeed score and the PageSpeed Insights vary on every website and there is a good reason for that, they share the same base code but GTMetrix uses an older version of LightSpeed than PageSpeed Insights. GTMetrix have also chosen to retain recommendations and rules that Google have done away with.

PageSpeed Insights Changes

On 27th of May 2020 PageSpeeds Insights went through a significant upgrade, we call this significant because it has seen a large shift in the weighting of scoring performance for your website.

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There are new metrics at play, with a massive shift towards Total Blocking Time which is the sum of all time periods between First Contentful Paint and Time to Interaction. In general terms this is to do with how long it takes for your code resources to be executed so that the page content is loaded and does not count loading information within this (like loading spinners).

Another new metric is the Cumulative Layout Shift, which figures out how much a page layout moves around in terms of when a visible element moves from its start position, this is classed as an unstable element. The browser looks at the viewport size and the movement of unstable elements in the viewport between two rendered frames. This has a low percentage in terms of your perfomance weighting at the moment but this is likely to change over time.

The Largest Contentful Paint metric reports the render time of the largest image or text content that is visible within the viewport when the page loads.

What these changes mean is that you may have noticed a big decrease in your performance score, or you may be alerted that PageSpeed Insights are scoring your perfomance low even if you have had optimisation done to your website.

Total Blocking Time and Largest Contentful Paint now make up 50% of your PageSpeed Insights score. Google have reported that websites will see themselves with a change of score, through their own testing 20% of websites gained a higher score, 30% of websites had no significant change however 50% of websites returned a decreased score of at least 5 points.

What Can You Do About Page Speed?

Optimisation advice remains the same:

1. Enable compression

2. Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML

3. Reduce redirects

4. Remove render-blocking JavaScript

5. Leverage browser caching

6. Improve server response time

7. Use a content distribution network

8. Optimize images

The most difficult and time consuming part of improving your website speed in relation to PageSpeed Insights new weighting is dealing with the code files that load with your website. While these can be picked up as render blocking resources by deferring or compressing them you could be breaking your website layout and functionality. Each resource loaded needs checked individually to see what effect this will have on your website.

This may all seem like a whole lot of tech speak, but if you are concerned about the speed of your website and the effect that this will have on your search rankings get in touch with us about the packages we offer. If you are already on an SEO package with us we are working over the next few months to improve the software we have been using for optimisation and checking the resources across your website.