What To Know: Site Performance Reports

We get tons of questions from clients about page speed and website performance reports, specifically when using Google’s PageSpeed Insights (PSI) tool. This is a powerful tool, however there is much more to a website’s loading time than is presented in PSI’s platform.

Key Points

1. PageSpeed Insights doesn’t include a full picture of how your site loads. Other tools like GTMetrix (which we use) leverages different tools & areas to compare results to give a full picture of your site performance.
   
2. Hitting a 100/100 score won’t guarantee you better organic ranking, and sites that load in under 1 second (anything under 3 seconds is desirable) may also not receive a 100/100. The important thing to remember is that while page speed is a ranking factor, there are many other factors and they all work together to improve your position in search engine results.
   
3. At the end of the day, your customers care about a site that loads quickly (no noticeable lags or slow loading images) and is interactive and easy to navigate. Google wants a website that people want to go to, and page speed applies more strongly to websites which are bogged down with unnecessary junk. If your website has high quality content, images, and loads quickly without noticeable delay, you will rank.
   
4. We use Kinsta for hosting, the guys who wrote this article on page speed, and they have a ton of integrations that work with WordPress to help speed it up! We always look for little ways to improve, but ultimately looking at GTMetrix to monitor loading times and Core Web Vitals from multiple sources is most important, along with having a beautiful website that is easy to navigate and looks good. 

Seeing a Low Score on PageSpeed Insights?

1. If you have a WordPress site, expect Google to mark mobile as looking very slow. Check for yourself, does your website load normally on your phone, or is there a noticeable delay?
   
2. Check your competitors, how are they scoring? Do they have a WordPress site?
   
3. Check Pingdom or GTMetrix for a more comprehensive picture.
   
4. Ask your marketing company! Here at Wit we can take a look and have our team create a plan, break down which aspects are the most important to correct, and explain if there is something that may not be as crucial as Google Page Speed Insights makes it seem. 

The Gist

We work relentlessly to make our client site’s faster in every way we can! We know that every little bit helps in the grand scheme of SEO. We make sure to focus on the whole picture instead of shooting for a specific rating on any one performance report. We like to find a happy balance between a site’s overall functionality and design.

For additional reading, here’s an in depth article from our hosting partner Kinsta: https://kinsta.com/blog/google-pagespeed-insights/

If you have questions about optimizing your particular site, reach out to a Wit SEO Specialist. We will run SEO audits, dig through your site, review your online listings and help you navigate next steps specific to you!

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