Pagespeed & Core Web Vitals

Every SEO professional knows that page speed is not just a “nice-to-have” feature; it’s a critical component of both your search engine rankings and your overall user experience. There are many tools available, like Google’s Pagespeed Insights, that give you a numeric score or a grade for your website’s performance. But it’s important to understand that the score itself isn’t the most important part. A score of 70 out of 100 isn’t a problem, and a score of 90 isn’t a silver bullet.

The real goal of measuring your page speed is to get actionable suggestions for improvement. These tools provide a list of things you can do to make your website faster. As an SEO, your job is to work with developers to find the low-hanging fruit: those improvements that are easy to implement but have a big impact. You’ll likely never get to a perfect score of 100, and that’s okay. The goal is to identify and fix the issues that are most affecting your visitors and, in turn, your SEO.

Google Pagespeed Insights

Google Pagespeed Insights is a free and quick tool provided by Google that offers a very accurate and extensive performance report. It’s built on a technology called Lighthouse, which is also available in your browser’s developer tools. The most prominent metric is the Pagespeed Index (PSI), which is a score from 0 to 100.

Pagespeed Index

The PSI score is a comprehensive metric that is calculated by six underlying metrics. These metrics are a great way to find out why your overall page speed score is what it is:

• First Contentful Paint: This measures how long it takes for the first content to appear on the screen.
• Speed Index: This measures how quickly the content becomes visually populated.
• Largest Contentful Paint: This measures how long it takes for the largest, most important element in the visible part of the page to load.
• Time to Interactive: This measures how long it takes before a user can fully interact with the page.
• Total Blocking Time: This measures how long a page is blocked from responding to user input.
• Cumulative Layout Shift: This measures how much the elements on a page move around during page load.

Google considers a score of 90 or more to be fast. A score between 50 and 90 means the page needs improvement, and anything under 50 is considered slow. It’s important to take this with a grain of salt. A score of 60 means you should definitely try to improve, but a jump from 80 to 90 is unlikely to have a noticeable impact on your rankings or user experience.

Core Web Vitals

In 2020, Google introduced the concept of Core Web Vitals. These are three important metrics that directly measure the user experience of a web page. They are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures loading performance.
• First Input Delay (FID): This measures interactivity.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This measures visual stability.

These metrics are a fantastic way to understand your page’s performance from a user’s perspective.

Difference between Mobile and Desktop

Pagespeed Insights provides a different score for both mobile and desktop versions of your website. You’ll often notice that the mobile score is a lot lower than the desktop score. This is because the mobile test simulates a slower connection and a less powerful device. You should focus on the score that matters most for your audience. If most of your visitors are on mobile, you should aim for a good mobile score.

Difference between Lab data and field data

The score in Pagespeed Insights is based on lab data, which is a simulated page load. Depending on how much traffic your website has, you might also see field data, which represents the experience of real users over the last 28 days. You should use the lab data for debugging and the field data to get a real-world view of your website.

Opportunities

The Opportunities section of the Pagespeed Insights report is where the real value lies. It gives you a prioritized list of suggestions to improve your score. Don’t just hand this list to your developers. Instead, work with them to identify the “low-hanging fruit” – the changes that are easy to make but will have a high impact.

Alternative tools

There are various alternative tools to measure page speed. The important thing is to pick one and stick with it. Every tool uses different metrics, so comparing scores between different tools is not very useful.

Pingdom

Pingdom is a tool that monitors websites and offers a free performance check. Much like Google’s tools, it gives you a score and recommendations for improvement.

GTmetrix

GTmetrix is another tool that provides a full performance report. It is also built on Lighthouse technology, so it’s a reliable alternative to Google’s own report.

Pagespeed in Google Analytics

Your Google Analytics account also has a Site Speed section. It includes metrics like Average Page Load Time and Server Connection Time. This report can be useful for identifying slow pages, but the data can be misleading because it only includes a small sample of your visitors.

Measuring page speed for all pages

The tools mentioned here are great for measuring the performance of a single page, but if you have a large website, it’s impossible to scan every page individually. This is where a professional SEO platform like Clickrank can help. Our platform scans all of your pages and gives you a prioritized list of tasks to fix pagespeed issues. This allows you to focus on your content and other SEO tasks while the platform takes care of the technical side. For example, our AI Image Alt Text Generator can help you improve your images, which is a key part of improving your pagespeed.