Confused about PageSpeed Insights vs Site Load for SEO Benefit?
-
I was comparing sites with a friend of mine, and I have a higher PageSpeed Insights score for mobile and desktop than he does, but he his google analytics has his page load speed higher than. So assuming all things equal, some quality of conent, links, etc, is it better to have a site with a higher PageSpeed score or faster site load? To me, it makes more sense for it to be the latter, but if that's true, what's the point of the PageSpeed insights?
Thanks for your help! I appreciate it.
- Ruben
-
Thanks for insights!
- Ruben
-
Press F12 in your browser and use the network tab you will not only get your load time you will get it broken up so you can see where the problem is.
Bing did a study on load times, and every 10ms worked out to cost the average ecommerce site $200+ a year. What is an average ecommerce site, I am not sure, but it tells you something.
-
I would prefer better load times in Analytics. It samples the actual load time of the pages on your site, and is a good indication on how fast your users are seeing your content. You build your site for users, not for search engines. Normally, the faster your site loads, the better the user experience will be.
Apart from that, Analytics allows you to analyse which browsers, operating systems, etc. have the best/worst loading times, which helps you to prioritise the issues that should be solved.
Page speed insights is a great tool and will give you a lot of useful information on how you can optimise. It's is not a measure of how fast a page is loading. If you have 4 x 200KB images on your site, that are losslessly compressed - the tool will be quite happy to give you a good score on image optimisation, even if images of this size will take ages to load over a mobile connection. On the other hand, it can give you a low score for some render blocking javascript or css file, that in reality hardly has an effect on the user experience.
There is a 3rd tool I often use to measure pagespeed (webpagetest.org) - it also indicates areas of improvement and gives scores on each individual item, and it will also shows you the load time of each individual item on your page. Maybe most important feature: it allows you to see how fast the visible content is completely rendered on screen (which is in fact the most important measure for your visitors).
Hope this helps,
Dirk
-
Hi there
PageSpeed Insights is a snapshot of a page at the exact moment you ask it to crawl. Google Analytics Site Speed evaluates your entire domain (or group of pages or page, depending on what you want to look at) speed over periods. So, that would mean a day, week, month, year, so on.
I find both to have their value. One for a quick assessment and resources of a particular page, like PageSpeed, the other for a more holistic performance that takes my entire site into consideration - breaking down everything from redirect speed to server connection and download speeds - Google Analytics Site Speed.
I would consider GA Site Speed to be more valuable, but again, both hold their weight and have benefits depending on what you are looking at.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Prioritising SEO Tasks for Biggest Impact
Hi I want to find out, what people feel the top 3 focuses should be for an SEO (I know there are hundreds)...Content/Backlinks/Social/Technical I'm trying to better prioritise my work - I work on a large ecommerce site - with just me as the SEO & a development team in France So most of the technical stuff is controlled there. I focus on audits, KWD research & briefing content how to better optimise products. A lot of time is taken up by that as the site is so big & I'm concerned I am not putting enough effort into other areas. What should these areas be?! Backlinks/Content/Blogs - I can't do everything but would like to prioritise tasks which will have the
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey
biggest impact Can anyone help0 -
Old school SEO tools / software / websites
Hey Mozzers, I am doing some research and wonder if you can help me out? Before Moz, Hubspot, Majestic, Screaming Frog and all the other awesome SEO tools we use today what were the SEO tools / software / websites that were used for aiding SEO? I guess we can add the recently closed Yahoo! Directory for starters! Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | RikkiD220 -
Website dance on Google Map results and organic seo results
My website is daily showing different position on maps.google.com and for the last few days like yesterday it was on 21st position on some keyword and today it is no where and same with other keywords. Is this a Google Dance ?? what can be its period ? and what is tyhe solution to handle it ??
Algorithm Updates | | mnkpso0 -
What are the most trusted SEO sites?
Other then SEOmoz what sites can you trust for SEO? Is there some type of formula I can use to find out if any site is trustworthy?
Algorithm Updates | | uofmiamiguy0 -
Climate of fear in the world of SEO
There certainly appears to be a certain climate of fear about backlinks at the mo, and not without reason. I was wondering why Google moved from simply discounting links to punishing site owners for their backlink profiles, many of which were built up when the risks of punishment weren't there? I mean, I could send them the names of at least 1,000 sites in linkfarms / blog rings - you name it. I'm sure most of us on here could do the same. Responding to the whims of Google is such a waste of time and resources. Why doesn't Google simply choose a direction and stick with it? What is their strategy exactly?
Algorithm Updates | | McTaggart0 -
Confused About Addon Domains and SEO
I find addon domains really confusing. Everyone I've asked so far says that they don't affect SEO but I find that really hard to believe considering the same content is on both a subdomain and a subfolder and also has it's own unique domain. PLUS (in my case) completely different niche sites are sharing the same hosting. I really don't want to pay for hosting for all of my different sites but at the same time, if it's better/safer to do so for Panda/Penguin reasons I'm happy to do that. Thank you for your time. I look forward to your opinions/suggestions!
Algorithm Updates | | annasusmiles0 -
Content on Wordpress blog inside the main website for SEO
Hi, We have our main website and our blog on blog.practo.com. Now what I see is that we wish to write in content to grow our seo keywords and links. Should we put the blog as www.practo.com/blog and then begin writing all the content or we should put the wordpress blog as www.practo.com/(wordpress blog here) and then begin writing the content. For best practices I suppose we should have content lined up as www.sitename.com/category/article name etc or www.sitename.com/article name etc - am I correct? Our main site consists of few html pages and then we have our software on a different sub domain. What are the best ways to publish content and get it crawled at a faster rate for growth? I would also wish to understand how to measure the number of growth in % to our content we are writing. Only via google analytics or some other tool? Say I wish to see the growth of 10 articles from month of may and compare it to the month of april or march 2012. So what tools could I use to see if we are progressing or not? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | shanky10 -
Site-wide Footer Link on Client/Friend Website - Dangerous?
Hi Guys, I've got a friend / client / business associate who's website I helped develop. It's a three letter dot-com, so good trust, and an eCommerce site, so lot's of pages. When I launched my new site about 6 weeks ago I put "Official IT Partner of MySite.com" in the footer. No keywords in the anchor text, just the domain URL... There are no other external links like that on the site whatsoever, and I haven't been hit by Penguin. I'm ranking well for local targeted keywords a few weeks after launch, and traffic continues to increase... I am worried that Google will see this is unnatural, but I've received no warning or experienced any decline in rankings. There's about 2800 pages linking from the site to my site, all in the footer of course. Would it be better to remove the link from the footer and add it just to the home page and a couple of other high authority pages, or should I leave it be. It's not "unnatural", I am affiliated with the site and work in partnership with the site, but it does fit that profile. I'm thinking about removing the footer link and adding a small graphic on the home page of the linking site which links to my root domain, with a couple of broad keyword anchored links in a description underneath that also link to relevant pages on my site... What do you think? 2800 links w/ my URL as anchor text from high Domain Authority / Low Page Authority pages (the homepage and a few other pages have decent authority) to my root domain OR Three different links from one High DA/ High PA homepage (one image alt, two anchored w/ broad keywords) to three different pages on my site. Again, there are no other site-wide external links on the domain, and I'm pretty sure I escaped the Penguin. Looking forward to hearing the different points of view. Thanks, Anthony
Algorithm Updates | | Anthony_NorthSEO2