A guide to page speed metrics

A guide to page speed metrics

Site speed is a very important area of website optimisation and SEO. People working in the world of Google SEO are becoming increasingly concerned about page speed. Google has released an update that will help make site speed a core ranking factor. Now is the time to audit your site speed if you haven’t done it for a while.

There are a good few site speed metrics tools out there, but it can be difficult to know what the difference is between them.

Page load time is the default site speed metric that Google analytics report on and the one that many different digital marketers pay the most attention to even though it is not the most useful. The page load time means the time needed to initiate and load a page completely. It is useful to note that a page can be useful and even look functional before it has technically fully finished loading. When you own a website users care more about their experiences than what is actually happening in the background. Google usually prioritises this when deciding which websites to penalise with their latest updates.

First contentful paint is really important to your engagement metrics; this is the first stage in the loading process where the user sees something actually happening. You see an increase in bounce rate when the user is not seeing progress in the loading bar. If users aren’t seeing anything happen after a few seconds then they will be more likely to move to a different page. If you would like to investigate the time to first contentful paint you can use Google’s page insights.

The document interactive time metrics is reported on in Google analytics. You will be able to access this information when you go to Google page speed report. In the explorer menu for page timings there is an option to view DOM timings. I would recommend changing the table view from its default setting of comparison to data.

It’s good to know what the metrics mean but you also need to know how to apply them to a digital marketing campaign.

You could use Google analytics to monitor the document interactive time and flag any pages that have high load time for further analysis. You can use pagespeed insights to get a more detailed report and then apply the optimisation recommendations that it so kindly provides to your website.

A good starting point is to check if any images are badly optimised as this is something that you can probably fix yourself without having to book in developer time.

Don’t understand page speed metrics? Need help with your Google page speed? Find out more about how we can help you rank better with our Google SEO services today!

Related posts

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.