Google says Website Speed above all else – and how to improve in 2019

This technical talk (it might be over your head) is the basis for this post’s content. Actionable highlights–for easier understanding and reference–are below.

Speakers: @paul_irish, @egsweeny, @AmirRachum

Performant sites are profitable sites.

I know it’s hard to believe, but we actually are that impatient.

There’s nothing more painful than having to layer performance on top of a fundamentally non-performant site.

The business doesn’t care about having a fast site. It cares about making money.

Site Speed Tools

• PageSpeed Insights (PSI) to find out how quickly real world Chrome users (CrUX) and “the lab” can load your site
• Lighthouse Stack Packs (coming soon) to give recommendations for performance, accessibility and other best practices based on your site’s underlying technology (e.g. WordPress)
• Google Search Console to monitor and investigate your site, recently adding a “Speed” enhancement to find all your site’s slow, average, and fast URLs and view speed trends after making changes. Its “Page Grouping” feature guesses which slow URLs have a similar experience/structure and therefore it’s likely to be able to fix all of the URLs within a single group with the same technical fix.
• The Chrome Developer Tools Performance panel is demoed in the video (22:00) and documented in the “Analyzing Runtime Performance” article
• The PageSpeed Insights API lets you get a JSON report, such as to create your own monitoring tool on a regular interval
• Compare the CrUX for one or all competitors within an industry via BigQuery
• Request Map and Third-Party Web to find the performance pain caused by third party assets (e.g. Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, AddThis, Amazon Ads) on your site
• Chrome ElementTiming API (coming soon) to perform one-off tests of when large or developer-specified (via the ‘elementtiming’ attribute) elements are displayed on your screen

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Our website services are not related to Google’s video.