How important is Lighthouse page speed measurement?
-
Hi,
Many experts cite the Lighthouse speed as an important factor for search ranking. It's confusing because several top sites have Lighthouse speed of 30-40, yet they rank well. Also, some sites that load quickly have a low Lighthouse speed score (when I test on mobile/desktop they load much quicker than stated by Lighthouse).
When we look at other image rich sites (such as Airbnb, John Deere etc) the Lighthouse score can be 30-40.
Our site https://www.equipmentradar.com/ loads quickly on Desktop and Mobile, but the Lighthouse score is similar to Airbnb and so forth. We have many photos similar to photo below, probably 30-40, many of which load async.
Should we spend more time optimizing Lighthouse or is it ok? Are large images fine to load async?
Thank you,
Dave
-
It's absolutely essential that your company website is fast.
Don't purchase slow, cheap web hosting, regardless of your business type.
Instead purchase super fast hosting for your business.
Sometimes, it's much more expensive, but it's well worth it as it can help improve your organic SEO.
We purchased lightning-fast hosting; this is the one reason why we are now selling more bath garden offices than ever before before.
-
it is important to distinguish between PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse. Maybe it's more important to follow PageSpeed Insights for your website. It becomes rather clear after reading this article https://rush-analytics.com/blog/google-pagespeed-insights-vs-lighthouse-how-do-they-differ. The differences between PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse are explained in an easy way.
-
My understanding is that "Page Experience" signals (including the new "core web vitals) will be combined with existing signals like mobile friendliness and https-security in May, 2021. This is according to announcements by Google.
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/11/timing-for-page-experience
So, these will be search signlas, but there are lots of other very important search signals which can outweigh these. Even if a page on John Deere doesn't pass the Core Web Vitals criteria, it is still likely to rank highly for "garden tractors".
If you are looking at Lighthouse, I would point out a few things:
- The Lighthouse audits on your own local machine are going to differ from those run on hosted servers like Page Speed Insights. And those will differ from "field data" from the Chrome UX Report
- In the end, it's the "field data" that will be used for the Page Experience validation, according to Google. But, lab-based tools are very helpful to get immediate feedback, rather than waiting 28 days or more for field data.
- If your concern is solely about the impact on search rankings, then it makes sense to pay attention specifically to the 3 scores being considered as part of CWV (CLS, FID, LCP)
- But also realize that while you are improving scores for criteria which will be validated for search signals, you're also likely improving the user experience. Taking CLS as an example, for sure users are frustrated when they attempt to click a button and end up clicking something else instead because of a layout shift. And frustrated users generally equals lower conversion rates. So, by focusing on improvements in measures like these (I do realize your question about large images doesn't necessarily pertain specifically to CLS), you are optimizing both for search ranking and for conversions.
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
-
Solved How to solve orphan pages on a job board
Working on a website that has a job board, and over 4000 active job ads. All of these ads are listed on a single "job board" page, and don’t obviously all load at the same time. They are not linked to from anywhere else, so all tools are listing all of these job ad pages as orphans. How much of a red flag are these orphan pages? Do sites like Indeed have this same issue? Their job ads are completely dynamic, how are these pages then indexed? We use Google’s Search API to handle any expired jobs, so they are not the issue. It’s the active, but orphaned pages we are looking to solve. The site is hosted on WordPress. What is the best way to solve this issue? Just create a job category page and link to each individual job ad from there? Any simpler and perhaps more obvious solutions? What does the website structure need to be like for the problem to be solved? Would appreciate any advice you can share!
Reporting & Analytics | | Michael_M2 -
Hello, our domain authority dropped significantly overnight from 37 to 29\. We have been building good links from high DA pages and producing quality, regular content.
Hello, our domain authority dropped significantly overnight from 37 to 29. We have been building good links from high DA sites and producing regular, good quality content. Anyone able to offer any ideas why? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ProMOZ1231 -
Irrelevant page with high bounce rate
I have a page on my site, www.waikoloavacationrentals.com/kolea-rentals/floor-plans, that gets me roughly 17% of my traffic. That being said it is not really relevant traffic because it comes from the search term "floor plans", which really has nothing to do with Hawaii vacation rentals, which is what I do. My question is does Google know how to figure that out when they are looking at my stats or is there a way to let google know that that page probably should not show up for that search phrase? On the positive, they are nice floor plans and if someone is searching for ideas for floor plans and see one of them in google images then it probably could help them, but it really is not relevant to my business. It has a 80% bounce rate, but does have an average time on page of 1.5 minutes, which is a fair amount for what is there.
Reporting & Analytics | | RobDalton0 -
Best way to handle duplicate title on Home page?
Moz reports two links to the same Home page ad duplicate titles ... http://myhjhome.com/index.php
Reporting & Analytics | | ElykInnovation
http://myhjhome.com I'm not sure if I should just 301 redirect http://myhjhome.com/index.php to http://myhjhome.com, or if there is a better way to handle that? Or should I comb the website and make sure all links to the Home page dont include index.php? Just looking for some extra help here, learning as I'm going, thanks!!0 -
Does analytics track an order two times by refresh on the confirmation-page?
Hi there,
Reporting & Analytics | | Webdannmark
I have a quick question. Does Google analytics track an order two times, if the user buys a product, see the confirmation page and then click refresh/click or back and forward again?
The order/tracking data must be the same, but i guess the tracking code runs for every refresh and therefore tracks the order two times in Analytics or does analytics know that it is the same order? Someone that can clearify this?Thanks! Regards
Kasper0 -
Can underscore blanks trigger home page bounce rates
Buongiorno from 8 degrees C Wetherby UK 🙂 On this site the scrolling banner has been hyperlinked with underscore blank causing new pages to open when a user clicks on a banner. My question is please... "If a user clicks on a banner will Google measure this as a home page bounce" ( I dont think it will i just want to be 100% sure) Click here for illustration:
Reporting & Analytics | | Nightwing
http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/home-page-sw-banner_zps0fda6318.jpg Grazie Tanto,
David0 -
What does "on first page" mean in seomoz ranking reports?
Hi - When reports here show numbers of keywords appearing "on first page", there must be some implicit assumption made about the number of results listed per page. 1. Can anyone tell me what that assumption is? Is it 10? 20? 2. What about universal results Local links? If the answer to number one is, for instance, 20 results per page, then are there any assumptions made about the number of universal results Local links included? I'm just trying to understand what the reports mean. Thanks, Tim
Reporting & Analytics | | tcolling0 -
A lot of traffic to one page from Google referral
We recently received a lot of traffic to one page from
Reporting & Analytics | | underthesun808
google.com referral. When I look in analytics it reports that the traffic is
coming from /url that’s not real helpful. Is there a way to get more specific
information as to what the referring url was?0