Hello everyone, Ryan here, and today we're going to be talking about Page Speed.
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What do you need to know about PageSpeed specifically in regards to the upcoming 2021 Google algorithm update?
A couple of things that we'll learn in this video is how PageSpeed impacts business. What page speed means the key loading metrics to focus on for user experience, and the impact of page speed on SEO. So to start off, how important is this to your users? Well, we took a couple of samples from a couple of studies, and the time that it takes to load the page is about 75% of the experience from users. So, if you look at the other metrics like how easy it is to find what you're looking for, how well the site is to screen, and those all have a smaller impact, the speed of the page actually loading on the device that the user is using.
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How it impacts business
As speed goes from say one to three seconds to load the probability of a bounce increases only 32%. Now, if it takes up to five seconds, you're at 90%, six seconds, you're at 106%, and 10 seconds you're at 123%. So you can really see the impact that it has on the bounce rate for users going to your site.
Defining Load time
Here, we're looking at a screenshot from something called Google Lighthouse. WPC says (that's the business that kind of runs the internet) "Load is not a single moment in time, it's an experience that, not even one specific connection metric can capture," and there are multiple moments during that load experience that can affect how fast or how slow user perceives the page to be. Here are some of those metrics, especially the ones that Google looks at (specifically Google Lighthouse).
First contentful paint is how long it takes for the first element on the page to load. So, like, the title text content, etc. Now the next three that we're looking at specifically affect the upcoming Google algorithm update that focuses on the usability of the website. The first is the first input delay. That means how long does it take between the time you click on something — specifically like interacting on the page — and the time that it takes that page to interact with your click.
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The next one is the largest contentful paint. That means how long does it take for the largest element on the page to load — whether it's an image, a background, a video, or something like that. And then loading stability also known as cumulative layout shift. Do those elements on the page move around as the page loads from an ad or something like that? You'll notice that Facebook's browser is really bad at this. When you click on an article and you're scrolling on your phone. It takes forever to actually get those ads to pop up, and can potentially cause a really bad experience if you're going to click on something and you click on an ad that you didn't want to. So, that's a very, very important one.
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Okay, so there are certain thresholds for each one of those items that we just looked at, and the thresholds for those actually loading. Here we see a chart where it shows on the left-hand side you can see first Contentful paint, first input delay, largest contentful paint, and the cumulative layout shift. Those can be measured in either milliseconds or seconds, and you can see on the chart here that, for example, first Contentful paint, a good score is zero to 1000 milliseconds, a poor score is over 3000 milliseconds so you take a look at this chart here, if that's something that you're really trying to focus on this kind of gives a good overall example of how fast they need to be to get a good Lighthouse score.
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PageSpeed and SEO
So Google had Google's already made speed, an SEO ranking factor. It first became official in 2010 for desktop and then in 2018, Google changed their algorithm to include that for mobile as well. Now, upcoming in May the core web vitals, that's going to be a major ranking factor now we don't know how much of a ranking factor, but it's a good time. Usually when Google says, a year in advance, that they're going to have a major update on this, that's gonna be a pretty big ranking factor. What's going to happen with those fast websites is that they're gonna rank higher and get more organic traffic than slow ones, simply because of that user experience.
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So how does, how come by actually work with the PageSpeed, so Google allocates a limited time, which they refer to as a crawl budget for each website. So, a fast loading time means that Googlebot doesn't have to spend as much time on your website to get the same amount as say another website or even more. And that's what PageSpeed will do so the faster loads, the more your content gets scanned by Google and the more keywords you rank for, and hopefully the more organic traffic you get.
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So remember, PageSpeed isn't just a technical problem, it's a business problem and that's a quote from Google. So this is what we've learned in the video today is how PageSpeed impacts business, what PageSpeed means the key metrics to focus on for user experience, and the impact of PageSpeed on SEO. Now, we do have another video showing how to buy software, and how easy it is to implement PageSpeed, so feel free to take a look, we've got a link to it in this video. Thanks for watching, we'll see you soon.
