How fast should a page load to get a Green light at Googles PageSpeed?

[ziiiva123]

So, trying to get e big e-commerce site to work on their page loading issuses. Their question left me without an answer, so how fast should a site be, so that it will get a Green light at the Googles Page Speed test?

Is there a number in seconds? Do we know that?

[ThomasHarvey]

The answer shouldn't be "what does it take to get a green light" it should be "what's the quickest we can get it for our user". The ideal speed should be under two seconds to load a page.

[BentoPres]

I don't believe there is a 'magic number'. As fast as you can get it...

It also depends on what the competition does if it will help you at all to improve your score.

Then again, I've read over and over that the PageSpeed score sometimes is something no to worry too much about, as some of it suggestions for improvement are simply undoable to have the site working properly.

But it'll be hard to convince your client to become 'unbelievers' of a grade by a major brand…!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Obviously the answer has already been giving here but I just wanted to get in and say that most of the recommendations that are usually in there are sometimes indeed not effective enough to pick up. If you still have to save 5kb on image load to make sure people have to download less files it's probably not worth to pick it up. However it provides awesome guidelines in general to make sure that redesigns or new sites that you're building will follow the guidelines completely.

[ThomasHarvey]

I'd say that 5kb is definately worth it! Even on bandwidth alone, if you get that image downloaded 10 times that's 50kb in bandwidth saved.

[Linda-Vassily]

Here are the details about PageSpeed insights. A score of 85 or better will get you the green bar.

Note that this is based on network-independent aspects of page performance like server configuration, HTML structure of a page and its use of external resources such as images, JavaScript, and CSS and is not a direct "speed test." [The actual number of seconds will vary based on connection.]

[ThompsonPaul]

To be clear - Pagespeed Insights does not measure the speed of a page, It's entirely possible to have a score of 90 and a load time of (a disastrous) 29 seconds. I have screenshots to prove it

All Pagespeed does is check for the typical server/software configurations that "usually" lead to faster pages, as Linda mentions.

All you should care about is what your VISITORS experience and what they think is "fast enough". You need to put RUM (Real User Monitoring) on the site's pages so you can directly correlate visitor behaviour/conversions to page speed. (And so you'll actually know what speed real users experience, as opposed to the totally synthetic speed tests like Pagespeed Insights or even webpagetest.org/gtmetrix etc.)

If the site uses Google Analytics, this RUM is built in, but you must adjust the tracking code snippet to get worthwhile value from it. By default, Analytics will only track 1% of pageviews' speed. Adjusting the tracking snippet will allow tracking of up to 100% of pageviews or 10,000 pageviews per day.

You'll have SERIOUS power in your hands when you can see the actual speed performance of all pages that takes into account REAL user variables like connection speed, location, browser, mobile vs. desktop, time of day/server load etc, etc. Don't guess - use data.

Hope that helps?

Paul

P.S. If the site does have really high-volume traffic, you will already have at least a bit of data in the Site Speed report in GA at teh defualt 1% You can use it as a baseline to prompt action and to measure improvements, but you want to get up to that 10,000 pageviews tracked per day as soon as possible.