Don’t fall down the “Perfect Score Rabbit Hole”
I have seen it so many times, where a website owner or developer will spend an immense amount of time, money, and resources to get the website a PageSpeed Insights performance to 100% . Does not matter if the testing tool for speed is another one for example GtMetrix, the same holds true for any website loading speed test. Is it worth it? Time for some “brutal honesty” here – probably not!
A “perfect” score of 100 is extremely challenging to achieve and not expected. Those are Google’s words not mine. First off speed/optimization testing is a guide to assist in optimizing your website, consider it a roadmap for optimizing the site. Look at the suggestions the reports give you and work on those that you can. Some elements of your site are required to get your message to the user and should not be sacrificed just to achieve a perfect score.
Page speed is a subjective value perceived by the user.
Let’s take a look at 3 different visiting your site for the first time. All 3 are using the newest most powerful mobile device out there.
But one is at home connected to his wifi, one is connected to a fast 5G mobile connection, and the third one is connect to a slow 4G mobile network.
The one connected to his wifi may perceive your site as “blazing fast”. The one connect to a fast 5G may perceive your site as “fast enough”. The user connected to the slow 4G perceives you site as a “slow sluggish site”.
There are just so many variables that are not under your control that chasing a 100% score is like falling down and endless “rabbit-hole”. Instead concentrate on the things under your control. Write unique good quality content and work on the suggestions from the speed test if they are pertinent.
You could remove all the JS, CSS, images and animations from your site and just have a simple text website; however, it will create a very poor user experience. Even though you have a 100% score, your site will be boring, the visitor will leave and probably never return.
Test it yourself – I dare you!
So how important is that speed score in ranking your site. Google does not give out its algorithms on how important it is. So test it yourself. Go to your mobile device and search for “lawn service” and scroll down past the sponsored (paid ad) listing, the mapped businesses, and any listing services (Angie’s list, Yelp, etc). Look for the first 3 actual listings. Then run those websites through PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile scores. We just did this here.
Here are our results
Website #1: The top listed website scored a mobile score of 55 (not a 100) and loaded in 4.0 seconds.
Website #2: The second listed website scored a 66 (higher than the first website) and loaded in 2.5 seconds (1.5 seconds faster than the first website).
Website #3: The third listed website scored a 30 and loaded in 13 seconds.
Are these the results I expected? Nope. I would expect these all 3 websites to have better speed scores than they do. If speed score held a high weight for search engine results you you would expect website #2 to really be #1.
What does this mean?
It means that other factors hold a higher weight than speed scores. I assume that good unique content holds a higher weight, as does the user experience.
On a personal note, when I was surfing the 3 sites, I notice for website #1, that the content quality and user experience was much higher than the other 2 sites.
So how much value does Google assign to speed score and other factors, who knows. Let’s just call it “Google Magic”.
This does not meant that a good speed score and good core vitals are not important, as they are a part of a good user experience.
It does mean that content is KING (unique good quality content)!
