Confused about PageSpeed Insights vs Site Load for SEO Benefit?

[KempRugeLawGroup]

I was comparing sites with a friend of mine, and I have a higher PageSpeed Insights score for mobile and desktop than he does, but he his google analytics has his page load speed higher than. So assuming all things equal, some quality of conent, links, etc, is it better to have a site with a higher PageSpeed score or faster site load? To me, it makes more sense for it to be the latter, but if that's true, what's the point of the PageSpeed insights?

Thanks for your help! I appreciate it.

• Ruben

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

PageSpeed Insights is a snapshot of a page at the exact moment you ask it to crawl. Google Analytics Site Speed evaluates your entire domain (or group of pages or page, depending on what you want to look at) speed over periods. So, that would mean a day, week, month, year, so on.

I find both to have their value. One for a quick assessment and resources of a particular page, like PageSpeed, the other for a more holistic performance that takes my entire site into consideration - breaking down everything from redirect speed to server connection and download speeds - Google Analytics Site Speed.

I would consider GA Site Speed to be more valuable, but again, both hold their weight and have benefits depending on what you are looking at.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[DirkC]

I would prefer better load times in Analytics. It samples the actual load time of the pages on your site, and is a good indication on how fast your users are seeing your content. You build your site for users, not for search engines. Normally, the faster your site loads, the better the user experience will be.

Apart from that, Analytics allows you to analyse which browsers, operating systems, etc. have the best/worst loading times, which helps you to prioritise the issues that should be solved.

Page speed insights is a great tool and will give you a lot of useful information on how you can optimise. It's is not a measure of how fast a page is loading. If you have 4 x 200KB images on your site, that are losslessly compressed - the tool will be quite happy to give you a good score on image optimisation, even if images of this size will take ages to load over a mobile connection. On the other hand, it can give you a low score for some render blocking javascript or css file, that in reality hardly has an effect on the user experience.

There is a 3rd tool I often use to measure pagespeed (webpagetest.org) - it also indicates areas of improvement and gives scores on each individual item, and it will also shows you the load time of each individual item on your page. Maybe most important feature: it allows you to see how fast the visible content is completely rendered on screen (which is in fact the most important measure for your visitors).

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[AlanMosley]

Press F12 in your browser and use the network tab you will not only get your load time you will get it broken up so you can see where the problem is.

Bing did a study on load times, and every 10ms worked out to cost the average ecommerce site $200+ a year. What is an average ecommerce site, I am not sure, but it tells you something.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Thanks for insights!

• Ruben