Google will now make page speed a ranking factor from July

People want to be able to find answers to their questions as fast as possible — studies show that people really care about the speed of a page. Although speed has been used in ranking for some time, that signal was focused on desktop searches. Today we’re announcing that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.

Thoughts?

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I’m curious on how this will help or hurt rankings because the Google PageSpeed tool is inconsistent with other tools that measure site speed. And I’ve seen it give a page with 95 requests (literally) a score of 83 on desktop once then a red score, then an orange score…all within the matter of 30 minutes.

Maybe @Waldo would have some insight on the Page Speed tool and how Webflow might be able to improve overall scores of Webflow sites.

This is also probably a way for Google to “force” users to use their “AMP” functionality to rank higher.

So if Webflow were to solve this issue, they will need to fix both “blocking scripts in the header(surprised that there’s no wishlist item for this yet) and “support for AMP”, and also probably “GZIP compression” and “auto optimize images

Unfortunately this issue has been ongoing since 2014…

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Not particular impressed with webflow page speed testing using Google’s new lighthouse or page speed insights.

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It is necessary because world wide users need fast load time of website. When they access any website it loads with in seconds. And we all know how important the page sped is! There are thousands of content on web which aims that every website should load with in seconds!

The one thing that perplexes me about the page speed test results is that it really depends on what service you use to test a site what the results are. And I have sites that perform very well (using Chrome network test) and seem to perform excellent (load in less than 2s) in the “wild” but don’t get top marks on the Google Speed test. Then I have other sites that perform just okay in the wild but score better. I have sites hosted with Flywheel, Squarespace and Webflow. Same type of results on all platforms.

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The problem with google-page-speed-scoreno relativity.
I made last month site’ with - static site CMS! (Speed of 300-500ms per page + All of the patterns for great performance + “Performance grade” -100 in pingdom) and get a score of 60 - why?
Some logo.png could be 66kb instead of 88kb after one more compress (22kb!!) + Google analytics code also throws an error (Leverage browser caching - example).

I think the algorithm score is very weird (Its like checklist and zero depends on the “real” site load).
Webflow , for example, are "need for speed" (VS blowout WP sites with 30 plugins and 9,000 lines of unused CSS) + responsive images + CDN (Very hard to setup this environment manually).

Why its matter?

The real problem is with clients that check the site and say “Hi - why the score is 70?”…

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Exactly! I’ve had the same type of situations on numerous occasions.

Google’s page speedtest is a bunch of BS. They don’t care about the most important thing which is how fast your site loads. Notice how they don’t even include the page load time in their results.

It doesn’t care whether your site is fast or not, it cares whether or not you made the site faster their way. And I think this is further evidence by how hard they’ve pushed for people to use “AMP”.

I’d be totally cool if Google was just focusing on how quickly a page loaded and whether multiple device types and browser can open it. What I’m not cool with is being strong-armed into adopting a specific framework/language. (I imagine most developers feel the same way.)

That’s pretty much exactly what’s happening with AMP.

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As I understand it Google does consider load time with their test my site tool. It compares to millions of other sites over a 3g connection. I have a site hosted, minified etc, that is css only plus a few icon 12kb icons. I only get a good (4s load time) https://testmysite.withgoogle.com/

I watched the latest google webmaster meetup on this. Worth watching. Google Hackathon on AIR - Web Performance Tools - YouTube

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