Page Speed Insight | Google

Google PageSpeed ​​Insights

Nothing ruins a great website more than a bad loading experience. Google has also reported that visitors who experience a loading time of seven seconds are 113% more likely to bounce off a page. This figure highlights the importance of loading time in the user experience and therefore in SEO. Webmasters must then optimize their sites in such a way as to make the pages load faster. For this purpose, the search engine offers a tool for checking the loading time: Google PageSpeed ​​Insights. This tool also identifies issues with slow page processing and makes suggestions to make pages faster. In this description, we learn about this tool and how it works. We will then see how to interpret the results obtained after analyzing your site. Finally, we walk through tactics to make your site load faster using this tool.

What is Google PageSpeed ​​Insights?

Google PageSpeed ​​Insights is one of the analysis tools that the American firm makes available to its users. This tool assesses the overall speed of your website by collecting a set of data and analyzing it. After analysis, it assigns a score to your site in terms of speed and indicates areas for improvement. What’s special about this tool is that once you use it, you will be able to know which aspects of your site are lacking and which ones it excels at. In other words, you will know where to make improvements. That said, the purpose of using this tool will be to figure out what improvements are being made and how to go about it.

What is the importance of using the Google PageSpeed ​​Insights tool?

Checking your site’s speed is important for two reasons: it can affect your ranking in the SERPs and hurts your visitor’s experience. Indeed, Google’s algorithms take into account the speed of your site as one of the factors that determine the position of your website. According to a study by Traffic Radius, the sites with the best positioning on the first page have one thing in common: above-average speed. This suggests that speed is important for SEO. Additionally, the chance of a visitor bouncing off your site increases by more than 120% if your webpage takes 10 seconds to load. This indicates that speed is also crucial for the experience of your visitors. https://www.twaino.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Study-showing-that-the-speed-of-loading-is-strongly-related-to-the-rate-of-rebound.jpg _ as an example, Mozilla made its page 2.2 seconds faster and saw an additional 60 million downloads per year.

How does the Google PageSpeed ​​Insights tool work?

Broadly speaking, this tool works in two ways: it first analyzes your page load speed and then compares this data to an average of previously analyzed pages.

Load Time Analysis

The tool measures the speed of your site through its assets, including whether your website uses plugins, code scripts, images, and tons of assets. Since all of these resources need to communicate to deliver the content your customers see, there are times when some may naturally take longer to load than others.

Data comparison

In this step, Google PageSpeed ​​Insights compares the data it has just collected and then averages this data in order to rate you.

Mobile vs Desktop Speed ​​Analysis Because

search results are different on mobile and desktop, it’s important to know how your site loads on each of these devices. Google PageSpeed ​​Insights then analyzes your site for mobile devices on the one hand, and for computers on the other.

How to use Google PageSpeed ​​Insights and interpret its results?

The tool’s home page shows you a field where you will enter the URL of your site or a specific page. When you click Analyze, the tool starts testing your site and shows you the mobile results after a few seconds. Clicking on Desktop will display information for computers.  Once the test is completed, it is essential to understand and learn to read this information to use the tool optimally.

The score

When you receive your score, it is a value between 0 and 100.

• 80 to 100: Anything in this range is an excellent score;
• 60 to 79: This range corresponds to an average score;
• 0 to 59: Anything in this range is the lowest of the lows, and you need to fix it ASAP.

Contentful First Paint

This metric tries to determine “when the user believes the main content of the page is available”. Of course, a speed measurement does not “feel” what the main content is, so it is an approximate measurement.

Speed

​​index This index measures “how quickly the content of a page is loaded”. It is similar to the other two previous measures since it is linked to the speed of viewing the page by the user.

Interaction

time This is the time it takes for the page to be fully interactive and to react promptly (within 50 ms) to your clicks/keystrokes.

First CPU Idle

This metric and the Interaction Time metric relate to how quickly a user is able to easily interact with the page. While the browser is processing a request, clicking on any element causes a significant delay.

Maximum Interactivity

Timeout This timeout is associated with the amount of time the browser is busy performing the longest “task” that could prevent it from responding to the user’s click or keystroke.

Opportunities and Diagnostics

The information mentioned in these two parts does not specifically affect your score, but improving them should lead to improvements in the criteria that affect the score. These are suggestions for improving the various measures presented above.

How to improve page speed?

PageSpeed ​​Insights provides a wealth of helpful tips on how to fix the issues it finds. Here are some tips to ensure optimal page performance:

• Make sure all images are properly formatted and compressed;
• Combine and compress CSS and JS files to lower the number of requests;
• Minimize the processing of HTTP requests needed to render the page as much as possible;
• Use browser caching so that content does not have to be downloaded again;
• Compress HTML, CSS and JavaScript content;
• Limit the number of redirects to a minimum;
• Avoid unnecessary DNS lookups by reducing the number of host names;
• Prioritize content above the fold by styling it with a separate CSS file;
• Minimize the number of plugins and widgets if using a CMS.

Fixing the above issues can bring huge benefits to individual web pages, but you shouldn’t forget about the important factors that influence the speed of your website as a whole. PageSpeed ​​Insights remains a very handy tool for measuring page performance. It provides much more reliable information about the loading time on site.