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
-
Ecommerce SEO help
Hi I'm having difficulty managing our product pages for optimisation, we have over 20,000 products. We do keyword research & optimise product titles/meta of new products - however there's a lot to clean up but we have done a lot. I find we rank/convert better on product pages so they would be great to focus on - however when an old product is discontinued, the page is removed & we lose authority by creating new pages for similar products - does anyone have any ideas for managing this? This is something done automatically on the dev side in France. I then have the issue of trying to rank category pages - these are highly competitive areas competing with big brands. I'm finding it tough to know where to focus, the site is vast and I am the only SEO. I've started looking into low hanging fruit - but these aren't necessarily the areas which bring in much revenue. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Case Sensitive URL Redirects for SEO
We want to use a 301 redirect rule to redirect all pages to a lower case url format. A 301 passes along most of the link juice... most. Will we even see a negative impact in PageRank/SERPS when we redirect every single page on our site?
Algorithm Updates | | tcanders0 -
Site refuses to improve rankings. Can someone else put a set of eyes on this for me and see what I am missing?
Hello! We've been successful with over 40 clients and getting them to great results in our industry, insurance. We recently acquired a new client who had an existing website with prior SEO results a very spammy blog and many spammy links. We've removed many of the blog articles and links using the Google Disavow Tool We've been monitoring this site in a campaign on Moz, but we're seeing zero improvement week to week. Can someone put another set of eyes on this and see if we're simply just missing something? Results for all 30 of our tracked keywords, zero are in the top 50! I would guess this was an algorithm penalty, but it has been 3 months now since we've made the changes and nothing is changing... not even a little bit! Any help/suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated. Thank you and enjoy Labor Day weekend!
Algorithm Updates | | Tosten0 -
Why does Google say they have more URLs indexed for my site than they really do?
When I do a site search with Google (i.e. site:www.mysite.com), Google reports "About 7,500 results" -- but when I click through to the end of the results and choose to include omitted results, Google really has only 210 results for my site. I had an issue months back with a large # of URLs being indexed because of query strings and some other non-optimized technicalities - at that time I could see that Google really had indexed all of those URLs - but I've since implemented canonical URLs and fixed most (if not all) of my technical issues in order to get our index count down. At first I thought it would just be a matter of time for them to reconcile this, perhaps they were looking at cached data or something, but it's been months and the "About 7,500 results" just won't change even though the actual pages indexed keeps dropping! Does anyone know why Google would be still reporting a high index count, which doesn't actually reflect what is currently indexed? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | CassisGroup0 -
If the homepage is sandboxed for a keyword is the whole site sandboxed for that keyword?
If the homepage of a website has been sandboxed for certain keywords does this mean that the whole site is sandboxed for them keywords or just the homepage? If a new sub-page was created with quality unique content, would it be possible to get that sub-page ranked for the same keywords that have been sandboxed on the homepage? I have asked many other SEO professionals this same question and nobody really knows for sure. Do you?
Algorithm Updates | | Mark A Preston0 -
Is changing your meta titles frequently good SEO Practice
Greetings, Im a new SEO and really knew nothing until signing up to SEOMoz. After reading the SEO101 and gathering as much information in a short period of time things started to become a little clearer. So I started my first campaign used my new SEO knowledge and input all of my meta information. Then I waited a few days to see what happened with my search result. We had never ranked for a single keyword before mind you. So a couple/few of days go by and I started punching in my keywords and looking through the pages. There I was page three. I was SO happy. I read the entire SEO101 again, realized a little more about what I had to do. So I started changing everything up, adding pictures, I found out what a IMG ALT Attributes were in the HTML editor, bolded text and all the other things I missed the first time around. Three days go by and I move up again. I start to notice my traffic is increasing and I am actually getting organic hits through search traffic. This has never happened before. I am over the moon. But I realize that I have my main focus keyword as the second key word in my title tag. So I switch the two words around, wait a few more days. Here's why I ask my question. The original title tag was still showing up and I was on the first page for both keywords, and I could see both title tags when searching for either keyword. So; Is changing your meta titles frequently good SEO Practice ? Warmest regards, Michael S&M Warning: adult site, NSFW
Algorithm Updates | | Sexandmetal0 -
Is using WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin) ok for On-Page SEO?
Hi Mozzers, I'm investigating multilingual site setup and translating content for a small website for 15-20 pages and came accross WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin) which looks like it could help, but I am curious as to whether it has any major international SEO limitations before trialing/buying. It seems to allow the option to automatically setup language folder structures as www.domain.com/it/ or www.domain.com/es/ etc which is great and seems to offer easy way of linking out to translators (for extra fee), which could be convenient. However what about the on-page optimization - url names, title tags and other onpage elements - I wonder if anyone has any experiences with using this plugin or any alternatives for it. Hoping for your valued advice!
Algorithm Updates | | emerald0 -
How useful is a mobile version of your site (for SEO sake)?
We're investigating a mobile version of our e-commerce site. Is it worth the investment regarding search engine optimization, or is this something that wouldn't have a big effect?
Algorithm Updates | | 9Studios0