What's one supposed to do when PageSpeed only points to Google's own asset delivery services as being "the" big problems which cause a lower score?
- "serve images in next gen formats" - complains about images served from tpc.googlesyndication.com
- "efficiently encode images" - same as above
- "reduce javascript execution time" - cdn.ampproject.org; securepubads.g.doubleclick.net; www.googletagservices.com
.. ?
I can easily get rid of those issues, "simply" by not showing any ads. The site will then be really fast, and... I'll get the ability to display ads again?!
Shame the ad-related revenue will be 0, which isn't unfortunately a good thing for the site.
Why is Google themselves not doing things "right" in order to ensure a speedy execution?
A while back, one of the reasons for a low score was that the GPT.js code (required to show ads) had a short expiration time. Dammit. How am I supposed to fix that, Google?
I had the same experience with Apple when the iTunes team were invalidating ProRes files created from Final Cut Pro.
On the other hand, it's a good thing to not give a free pass for bad behavior in products you produce.
Such as: buying GitHub is unlikely to be Microsoft's attempt to trap OSS; Apple's early adoption of new ports probably isn't motivated by selling an extra $12 dongle for every $2000 Macbook; a journalist criticising Facebook is rather unlikely to be acting on corporate orders to sully the competition, etc.
All the arguments for "but your user might already have such-and-such-version-of-jQuery cached" just have not had a good enough impact on total experience. There are so many versions of whatever you might be importing, and HTTP keep-alive works really, really well.
Of course, I also don't have any tracking setup, say nothing of the 50 dozen systems most sites use. I've never gotten anything out of them that I couldn't have figured out on my own. They always come back to "users bounce when shit is slow". Thanks, tracking scripts, for contributing to my bounce-rate.
So there you go, do you want to create a good user experience, or do you want to sell your users out for a pittance?
Have your first user experience in your site be super optimized. Static HTML. Host all assets on your own. Size images correctly. Minimize, then inline the CSS and JS. There are plenty of design-time scripts to automate it. And if you're making SPAs, you can implement all the dynamic loading you want past the initial page because users clicking to open your app are already engaged. But get that first page on-screen in less than a second on a 2G network.
Lighthouse definitely has some improvements to make for the audit suggestions that offer advice to improve the score. I think people get a little bit frustrated/blinded by the advice when there's nothing that can be done about third parties (I know I do!).
Our product Calibre (mentioned in the bottom of the post) has a n adblocking/third party blocking feature that allows you to compare your pages with or without third party scripts gunking up performance metrics (here's the release post: https://calibreapp.com/blog/release-notes-apr-2019/).
We've seen really good success in separating the two because it sends a clear signal of what a site WOULD score without ads. This is good because it makes it clear to PMs, management and decision makers that tracking tools incur a really visible cost.
How does https://calibreapp.com/ compare to https://www.webpagetest.org/ and https://www.sitespeed.io/ and https://gtmetrix.com/ ?
Why would someone want to pay you for your service, as opposed to using any of the above? Do you support browsers other than Chrome? Do you support a wide variety of simulated hardware? Do you support a wide variety of testing locations? Do you support any page speed test profile other than Lighthouse and Google Page Speed? Do you support running your software in a Docker container of my own choice?
Because I can get all those things via one or more of the competitors in this space, and I'm not seeing any compelling reason to even look at Calibre.
Please feel free to convince me that I'm wrong.
I knew PageSpeed was bunk when that recommendation came up on a web page I was working with. All of the "next gen" formats that PageSpeed recommended weren't supported by any mainline browsers — not even Chrome.
That may have changed by now, but my opinion of PageSpeed hasn't.
I'm sick and tired of Google playing the role of the global regulator of what's acceptable and what's not. Not everyone can afford own data centers and CDNs to serve content. Not every single page can benefit from SSL.
And web's not the only area they are regulating through monopoly - the number of hoops one has to jump through these days to run an e-mail server, just to have its e-mail acceptable by the holy Google e-mail servers is silly.
huh?
Mind you, also virtually no traffic and very little and lightweight content, but still...
Antitrust here?
We've deliberately excluded mobile devices from our ad campaigns. Do I understand correctly that even though we do not serve any mobile visitors at all, we're still judged by the page speed of the mobile page, not just the desktop one?
How is that possible, if people know your domain name they'll type it in to their phone/tablet/watch/gamepad (or search from their shared history, or whatever). Do you reject connections that indicate they're from non-desktop devices??
I can see "we don't target mobile" but users don't often care what you're targeting and to my surprise recently I had to review mobile usage and found that it's higher in general than desktop across the board and my sites (small local websites and personal sites, mind you) followed that trend.
I understand what you're saying, but we can literally see from Google Analytics that we have 0 mobile visitors. As would be expected.
It just seems weird for being judged by our mobile experience in this case, but it would good to know if this were the case.
Speed is a feature. Speed is your most important feature. It’s a gazillion times more important than all the other cool features that developers and product managers think are important.
I've left significant levels of details about pagespeed on the lighthouse issue tracker over the last few months. It's really frustrating to see the lighthouse team being blamed for something that isn't operationally even theirs… but that's a big company for you.
The biggest contributing factor to unstable pagespeed scores is the power of the machines that do the tests. Last time I checked the scores / bench mark scores for pagespeed were all over the place. … All the same, it's really important to understand how it all works. Hopefully the post had something for you?
Also this seems like the right time for me to brag about the impact we were able to have on our site's responsiveness. I know a lot of people will think a lot of this is BS being pushed by Google, and I agree in some cases, but overall our site is incredibly fast now (perceptively, significantly faster), and that's thanks to Lighthouse and its suggestions.
This is without HTML caching, so still some room for improvement :) https://i.imgur.com/d7KCTmj.png
This is a full Vue SPA with chunking enabled.
Edit: oops, I was behind a VPN when I ran the test which impacted my ping. All metrics are down to 0.3s max :)
July 2018, according to both linked sources.
Thanks.
