Google Page Speed Score 91, But 5-8 Seconds to Download URL

[Kingalan1]

Greetings MOZ Community:

In Google Analytics under "Site Speed" under "Behavior" our home page has a page speed rank of 91 which I assume is pretty fast. However the "Average Page Load Time" is varies between 5 and 8 seconds, which seems very slow. My developers have made major efforts to optimize the home page URL (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) for speed.  The page has a carousel which I assume may be slowing it down. Is the download speed of this page detrimental to SEO? Or is the favorable Page Speed Score good enough.

I am particularly concerned because the most competitive phrases are ranked on the home page. As it stands I am having a lot of difficulty ranking in the top ten for these pages. My concern is that the slow download speed of the home page could be holding back ranking of these terms. If necessary I can always redesign the home page and remove the carousel or reduce the number of listings in the carousel to speed it up.

Is this worth investing effort in or is the speed good enough?

Thanks, Alan

[TheeDigital]

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/c7KWrp/www.nyc-officespace-leader.com

I just ran a test and got a load time of less than a second for your site. Now this may be without much server load, but it looks like you already use caching and I don't see anything too out of the ordinary. It may be that your server slows when it gets loaded down. Maybe look into caching pages into ram or an ssd on the server side, but I don't think there is much more on the website side you can do to help.

[Kingalan1]

Thanks.

Yes, test like Pingdom show that the data downloads quickly. However Google show an average page load time of 5-8 seconds for the home page. So I don't know if from Google's perspective the page is considered fast or slow. As a result I don't know whether it is worth investing resources to improve speed. The home page is of particular concern because it ranks for competitive keywords.

Maybe displaying listings on the home page carousel is a bad idea as may increase page load time.

Alan

[TheeDigital]

Can you go to Google Analytics and go to Behavior > Site Speed > Overview and see if there is any particular browser that is loading really slow and throwing off the data? It could be that the mobile version is not well optimized and this makes up a lot of your traffic, or that cell service is slow in the market, or there may be some browser specific issues.

[Kingalan1]

Good Idea!!

Speed is the following:

Internet Explorer: 1.04

Safari: 2.57
Amazon Silk: 3.35
Firefox: 4.61

About 80% of the traffic is for I.E. , Safari and Amazon.

It seems speed is pretty good for most pages. However the home page load time is particularly slow. Maybe it has something to do with the carousel containing listings. But at the same time the Page Speed Score is 91 for the home page. So I don't know if this is detrimental for ranking.

Thanks, Alan

[DirkC]

Hi,

What is the % of mobile visits - could you check the page speed within Analytics with segment 'Mobile'?

I prefer to use webpagetest.org rather than pingdom - because it seems to give more realistic results (pingdom always seems to load faster than webpagetest).

On your desktop version everything seems ok - site loaded in 2.3 sec - images are very heavy though: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150103_1M_SYT/

Different story on mobile: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150103_CT_T0H/ - initial page load = 14sec - mainly because of the images (900K).

I would check if these images could be compressed - or remove the slider and replace it by 1 image.

rgds,

Dirk