Understanding page speed reports

Learn more about what's included in a page speed report, how to interpret, and important takeaways

The results of page speed reports may appear daunting, you may be curious about what certain items mean, or maybe you want to understand what improvements (if any) can be made to your website. More often than not, most of the items are not as big of an issue as they appear in the report.

Ideally, you will also want to take into consideration the real-life user experience with your website (on desktop and mobile) as well as the data and analytics for your website performance.

Common options for improvements:

• Removing the Header and Hero fade animations on all of the pages of your website --> just this action alone might give users faster access into your website and better improvement with search engine optimization results.

• Sizing images down that don't necessarily need to be as big as they currently are.

• Removing additional content from the website such as images, integrations, or simply anything that takes up space on each of your web pages.

• Removing unnecessary or unused third party integrations.

A few important takeaways:

• Items flagged in page speed reports don't necessarily mean that these issues are items that users are actually experiencing. They are moreso based on computers' interpretations.

• The devices that these tools use are typically older with slower data speed and do not represent the same experience that a user would have on their newer devices that will have faster load times.

• The results within these reports are also known to be inflated. The speed of a page, and the reported score is also not always connected. Google in particular, also tends to overestimate the time for when a site can be interactive.

• If you run the page speed test on other pages of your website, you can see how the results may vary.

• The time savings are purely estimated and are not necessarily tangible times that you can instantly shave off by correcting or implementing these things.

• These are automated reports and are not manually audited by an individual to check the various nuances, so these items are based on estimates.

What to consider:

• [IMPORTANT] It is important to consider and recognize that there may not be certain elements of your website that you wish to remove as they play an integral part in what you want to show your visitors and how they will interact with your website.

• It is impactful to engage in the experience of your website as a user would both on desktop and mobile, by testing out the experience on your devices.

• Many performance-related issues can stem from external, third-party resources such as Google, Facebook (or other social media integrations), conveythis, sharethis, etc. Please note that compression of the javascript for these would need to be done directly through the third party providers.

• View your website's performance and search analytics to understand and evaluate how this data may or not be coordinated with the page speed report findings.