Here’s Why Your Google PageSpeed Score Does Not Matter.
Let me start by saying we all know a slow loading website when we see one. And we all get frustrated by them.
Websites that take a long time to load can turn off visitors who are coming to your site and can potentially turn away hundreds of customers in the process. There is no argument there. That’s why at SiteSwan, we spend a lot of time optimizing our websites for fast load times on all devices, and it shows – check out your website built on SiteSwan from any device and you will witness lightning-fast load times nearly every time. So you may be wondering why your Google PageSpeed Insight score isn't a lot higher?
Websites that take a long time to load can turn off visitors who are coming to your site and can potentially turn away hundreds of customers in the process. There is no argument there. That’s why at SiteSwan, we spend a lot of time optimizing our websites for fast load times on all devices, and it shows – check out your website built on SiteSwan from any device and you will witness lightning-fast load times nearly every time. So you may be wondering why your Google PageSpeed Insight score isn't a lot higher?
The simple truth is: Your Google PageSpeed score does not matter.
Google PageSpeed Insights scores don't matter because they aren’t accurate. And they aren't accurate because they don’t, and can’t, grade a user’s true website experience. In fact, the Google PageSpeed test does not even measure the actual loading time of your site at all.
Your Google PageSpeed score is simply a subjective number based on an artificial test and general criteria that Google recommends to the average web developer. While it might offer some good tips and general rules to follow, it doesn’t actually measure the real user experience and actual loading time of the site. Simply put, there might be things about your website (behind the scenes) that Google flags as “slow” in their artificial test, but they may not be impacting the actual user experience or loading time of the site in REAL life. So your Google PageSpeed score is more of a “guess” than a score.
Even more frustrating, you can run the same website on Google PageSpeed from different browsers or at different times and get completely different scores each time. One day your score can be good, and the next day, it's bad. In addition, you can run your site on a bunch of other speed tests (there are lots of others) and you will see scores vary and that in general, SiteSwan websites perform great. For example on this one, many SiteSwan sites score 90+ out of 100 with load times less than 2 seconds.
The bottom line.
The truth is the ultimate test is real life testing – it's the most accurate and the most important. That’s why we are constantly optimizing our sites for real world use, and not artificial tests (which is something you can remind your clients of if they ask).
That doesn't mean we are ignoring Google's suggestions either. We are continually updating and optimizing SiteSwan websites on the back end so they always perform better – even on these tests. Furthermore, we recommend taking into consideration Google’s recommendations for improving your individual page score, such as resizing specific images and avoiding elements and third-party plugins that might be slowing down your site. But if you try implementing all of Google’s suggestions you might drive yourself crazy. Plus, some of Google’s recommendations are unrealistic or some even literally impossible. Ultimately, chasing a perfect Google PageSpeed score is a waste of time, nearly impossible to achieve, and since it doesn’t actually correlate to speed...why bother?
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