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Google Page Speed Insights, and Search Console - what is a good benchmark for an Insided web page?

  • 27 March 2021
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timcavey
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Is PageSpeed Insights a good tool that should be used regularly?

 

What’s an acceptable rating for mobile and for desktop?

 

What about the Core Web Vitals of Google Search Console? Should I be worried about a large number of ‘poor URLs’ showing on desktop?

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Best answer by Blastoise186 29 March 2021, 18:59

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Blastoise186
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For me personally, Google PageSpeed Insights is a pretty good tool for what it does. However, it’s worth remembering that it generally runs off of servers in datacentres with massive pipe connections at 10GB/s and beyond, which is far beyond what users will ever have access to.

For more real world testing, I tend to use Lighthouse, which is integrated within Chrome DevTools. It does pretty much everything PageSpeed can do - including generating a PageSpeed report - but it also does a few more magic tricks that can’t be done via a server based tool. It also gives me results based on a real world internet connection (which is very real world for me, because I’ve only got 8 meg down, 2 meg up!).

I also have access to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for domains/sites I own or manage myself. Bing Webmaster Tools is pretty terrible and tells me practically nothing useful, but Google Search Console often flags up very useful advice - such as issues that can destroy SEO. It also offers a way to have Google re-check pages after you fix them and have them re-processed. If your fix works and Google verifies the fix, the alert is cleared from your dashboard and GoogleBot will take care of the rest on its next run.

However, low scores are something to be aware of regardless. You ideally want to be turning both PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse green where possible, while also keeping Google Search Console etc happy. There’s other similar testing tools as well of course, some of which can do real-world simulations. I know a few, but I need permission to mention them here.

While my own sites consistently hit the high 90’s for Desktop and high 80’s to low 90’s for Mobile, that’s mainly because of things I do which are otherwise pretty difficult to pull off. Aim for the green zone and that’s a great step already. :)

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timcavey
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Great answer, thanks @Blastoise186 

 

One thing about page speeds is it’s on mobile devices that seems to be the worse effected. I’m guessing (what’s the best way to check?) that large images are a major factor to this score. This is why this idea below is a great one, why aren’t more communities seeing low Mobile ratings? Should moderators be systematically resizing large images, @Julian?

 

 

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Julian
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Well, SEO is an entire universe on it’s own, so please take my thoughts with a grain of salt, as I am not feeling confident in making absolute statements here. :)

But in my own opinion I also think that larger images are part of the problem here. Especially on mobile devices this can have a negative effect not just on the performance, but also on overall data usage.

We did some improvements around page speed lately, also including lazy loading. I am not sure but I don’t think this is including images as well (if @Blastoise186 is sharing such an idea, I am quite certain though it is not). I think it is not just how these images are being loaded, but also in which resolution. E.g. we want improve on the file size in which some smaller images are being loaded. Think about an article hero image of aroun 5MB being loaded just to be visible in a small featured topic card.

However, I see other, bigger themes that have an impact on your page speed as well. @bjoern_schulze also pointed out to me recently that unused javascript is usually the top feedback item shared by Google (when it comes to potential timesavers). Without a developer background, I understand that we do load some libraries which might not be necessary in all situations. So this is something worth looking into as well.

We periodically have planned in steps to improve the SEO value of your community, which goes beyond page speed as such. I will try to learn more about page speed specific plans we have and share them here once I am smarter. :)

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Blastoise186
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Totally agreed there @Julian !

Perhaps I should change my Idea from images to erm… EVERYTHING! :stuck_out_tongue:

If there’s one thing I can say, it’s that Lazy Loading media alone does help to reduce resource/data usage, especially for pretty much any assets that don’t get loaded at all during a particular session. Those giant 25mb image combos on comment 8 of a thread and the tiny 500kb one in Comment 2? Yup, only the tiny one will get loaded if you don’t go past Comment 3. I’ll probably deploy another Idea post for the optimisation stuff in a bit, but I believe I partially covered it with previous ideas.

And in true Blue Peter fashion… Here’s one I made earlier! :rofl:

At the moment, Lazy Loading is definitely on for some stuff, such as the Leaderboard, but not for media assets. :wink:

But yeah, putting things on a crash diet as well also helps - after all, the bloated code you guys knocked out when inSided switched from the legacy templates to Branded Templates will have probably made a huge improvement!

Overall, probably some of the biggest ways to boost page loads would be things like:

  1. Run your stuff from a decent server with plenty of horsepower and a good solid stack - trust me when I say that the pile em high, sell em cheap Shared Hosting packages at many well known web hosting companies isn’t gonna cut it! To hit the green zones at all, you’d need at least Cloud Hosting (where each customer is guaranteed the resources they’re entitled to and the load is spread across multiple servers in a cluster) for that to work out. I can definitely say inSided have ticked that box. :sunglasses:
  2. Lazy loading - especially for media assets! It can really help a lot
  3. Keeping the bloat down - try not to add libraries and Custom HTML just because you can, unless you actually need it! If you only need it temporarily, consider cleaning it up when you’re done.
  4. Optimise your media content - while it might be OK to allow huge file uploads for images etc, you’ll ideally want to crunch them down a bit before displaying them. Mobile users will thank you for it later. Formats like WebP and WebM can be extremely helpful here!
  5. Always make sure the most important stuff loads in first! Especially the important content you want your users to see as fast as possible. Other fancy stuff can always lazy load in afterwards with some clever tricks.
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timcavey
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Some really good advice here, thanks peeps!

 

These are the actions our community team can take, the rest is on you Insided ;)

 

  1. Keeping the bloat down - try not to add libraries and Custom HTML just because you can, unless you actually need it! If you only need it temporarily, consider cleaning it up when you’re done.
  2. Optimise your media content - while it might be OK to allow huge file uploads for images etc, you’ll ideally want to crunch them down a bit before displaying them. Mobile users will thank you for it later. Formats like WebP and WebM can be extremely helpful here.

 

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Blastoise186
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Hehehe.

I think it’s actually worth mentioning that when it comes to the inSided platform, all five of my top tips are technically a shared responsibility between both inSided and the customer, albeit to varying degrees.

Some of them definitely are more for inSided of course. AWS definitely has more than enough horsepower for example, but no-one outside of inSided has the ability to play with those switches. :wink:

I’m currently checking to see whether all of these tips exist as Idea posts already and I’ll consider raising the others. I’m definitely going to filter out the first one since it’s already covered and the third one isn’t valid because that’s on the customer. In the meantime, I’ve just written up one of the others, which you can find at 

 

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