Google Page Speed Insights Busted!

Article by Richard Hancock

Founder of Plus 8 Digital

Richard Hancock is the founder and driving force behind Plus 8 Digital. With over a decade of hands-on experience building websites with a focus on ecommerce and marketplace integration, he’s a proven expert in web design, development, SEO, and digital marketing.

Does your website pass the Googles page speed test?

Is your website fast enough? Take the test and find out. Submit your website to Page Speed Insights, click ‘Analyse’, and it will tell you how you are doing. The thing is that unless you’ve had an SEO professional work on it, you will fail!

If you don’t pass, should you be worried? Does it matter? Does Google use the metrics shown by its page speed insights tool for search engine results (SERP’s)?

If you can outrank your competitors by being faster, then surely it’s a good thing to work on. Pass the page speed insights test and you win! Game Over! But do you?

Every single SEO tool out there and a myriad of websites providing SEO tips will tell you that it does matter, that Google is calculating your page speed and dropping you into the abyss if you don’t hit the magical green 90+ score when you test your website in the tool.

Do you care? Should you? We take a closer look and, spoiler alert… it seems like it’s not that important! Want to read more, lets go.

Search “Does Google use Page Speed Insights for SERPS?”

“Your website needs to load at least as fast as the top 10 websites to rank on the first page”

Wow, we need to make our site fast…

So, with that impetus you do just like we did…. You edit pages to reduce excessive dom layout, you skinny down the pages for mobile and remove any render blocking calls to 3rd party code, you do all the things that a good SEO professional should do or you get someone to do it for you!

Then you install the best cache system that you can find and set up the perfect server stack and spend hours configuring and tweaking the settings until you get it just right.

Then you add the icing on the cake with a content delivery network (CDN) like Cloudflare to serve images and static content from super fast servers worldwide.

And Bingo! Green circles! You did it!

But was it worth the hours of frustration and time getting there? Was it worth the additional cost for plugins or extensions to support your CMS? Is it worth paying for a CDN to get you from a 85 performance fail to a GREEN 94.

Well, lets take a look at the competition and see what we need to do to keep up with your competitors.

First, how does the page that sets the bar do?

How does Google’s Page Speed Insights page do in its own test?

Page Speed Insights…

No way! That’s worse that the scores the we got. Sure, the page speed insights page has little or no competition for the top spot in the SERPS but come on, surely they should be hitting 100 on all four counts.

Has that just blown the whole metric out of the water?

Let’s check a few more sites to just make sure.

Google for Developers: Make the Web faster

So this is the site that we as developers will go to to check for the tools available to help with optimising pages.

https://developers.google.com/speed

So what do they score on Page Speed Insights…

Well, that’s not good!

Backlinko: Page Speed and SEO

Surely this will hit all four in the green.

But no, even the prominent advisor and the site that Google determines is the one to let us know that page speed matters is not hitting the mark.

So what about the real SEO contenders, Semrush and Ahrefs the two companies that provide the SEO tools that most of the profession use. Surely they will do well if not for SERP’s against each but otherwise, just to prove they can.

Let’s see how they hold up….

Semrush

Ahrefs

Again, neither of them really taking the metric seriously.

C,learly the page speed metric is a low-ranking factor. It can’t have the effect that is spouted from every site that has an article on why it matters; most just say it does, but we’ve not seen the evidence yet.

On the contrary, the evidence is that it does not matter one bit, and the myth is busted!

That said, if your website is bloated and takes forever to load on a mobile you need to work on page speed to retain visitors, and if you are competing against another site with similar traffic, backlinks, and content then working on page speed might just be the determining factor that puts you ahead of them in the SERP’s but otherwise, let it go.

Spend your time more productively by creating new content, reaching out for backlinks or taking a different route to marketing with emails, PPC or social media.

Realistically, Google is all about content. As long as it can get to a browser to be viewed, then great content is always going to outrank fast delivery.

If the page speed metric mattered so much, it would be a bit like ordering a takeaway and saying, “Well, as long as it gets here fast, I don’t care what it tastes like”.

So, stop checking Page Speed Insights and spending time getting that perfect score. It’s just not worth it.

And just as a final parting gesture, here is the score for Google Finance.

Google Finance Page Speed Insights Score

That’s really not good and probably says it all, content is king!

Making sure that pages are accessible and fast to load is important, and they need to load fast.

Visitors are quick to click and quick to move on to the next site if a page is taking too long to load, but it’s not what matters the most; it’s all about the content, backlinks and the 200 or so other ranking factors that Google uses to determine a website’s SERPs.

So take a break, concentrate on content, provide useful information to your target market, contact them with direct emails, use PPC advertising and SEO. If the page loads and the visitor can see what you have to offer, then game on!