PageSpeed ​​Insights: How important is a good score?

Web performance tests, such as PageSpeed ​​Insights or GTMetrix, are tools that can guide a developer to find weaknesses in a web page that may affect its speed or user experience. But a high score on these tests is often not possible. The result? The final score creates questions to a customer who does not fully understand how this number arises, due to lack of technical knowledge, while in the end, a perfect score is not so important for reasons that we will see below.

Requirements Change Over Time

The first reason is that the conditions for a good ranking over time change and evolve, making it difficult for a website owner to keep up with them every time. It also raises concerns such as whether Google search rankings will be affected and costs that may be incurred, which could have been avoided since, in the end, a good grade many times may not be so important.

How can one achieve a good position in Google results is one of the most frequently asked questions. The answer we give is that it depends on many factors (which we will develop in another article) and not just on a good PageSpeed ​​Insights score.

Third-Party Services

Another reason for the difficulty of controlling the result is that the score is often influenced by third-party scripts, which are difficult to intervene to improve. Simultaneously, it can be time-consuming and sometimes almost impossible to configure then as per the requirements of PageSpeed Insights. A typical example is when a website embeds features from Google services such as Analytics and Recaptcha or Facebook services such as Pixel. When you run the test on a website that utilizes the above scripts, you will notice that these scripts negatively affect the evaluation.

In the same case, it falls and a site that is not custom but is based on ready-made frameworks, platforms, a theme, and plugins, which may contain a lot of HTML code and not be optimized according to the requirements of the specific tests.

Major Brands Score

Another typical example, that impresses and reasonably raises the question of how vital these tools are, is the case of Apple and Google itself! In the photos below, you will see that we ran PageSpeed ​​Insights for the official Apple site and the Google online store. As you will see, their ratings are disappointing and especially for Google as the PageSpeed ​​Insights tool has been developed and belongs to it! What is certain is that these companies rank high in Google search results, despite having a low score on the test. The conclusion is yours to make.

 

Google and Apple PageSpeed Insights test

 

Summing-up

Concluding, what we suggest is that these tests should be used as tools to improve a website but not as an absolute and binding rule. Most important of all is to focus on the user experience on desktop and mobile devices and the loading times of a web page in real-time conditions. We know websites that load quickly with load times of 2 to 3 seconds, while in PageSpeed ​​Insights, they achieve a low score like 40/100.

How important is a high PageSpeed ​​Insights score to you? We would be curious to hear your opinion.

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