A slow website can cost you customers and money, and leave lots of potential engagement fleeing from your site.
No one likes visiting a slow website. Slow sites can be frustrating and annoying. They may even encourage consumers to click off the site to find information or buy products elsewhere.
Owning a slow website is a massive blow to your business. A slow website can cost you customers and money, and leave lots of potential engagement fleeing from your site.
This is exactly what Google’s new speed report can help to protect you against. You can use the tool to see which (if any!) of your site’s pages are slow. And then can you fix them.
But hasn’t this been done before?
True, it has. But as noted by Smart Insights, other tools are all unreliable. Third party speed-measurement tools have never been a good indication of how your site truly performs.
Google has improved upon what these tools offer.
Great – what’s so good about Google’s version?
So far, it’s only in a beta state, but it’s still a great tool. You get plenty of plus points:
It’s easy
Google’s Speed Report puts all of your URLs in one place. You don’t need to run multiple tests over a long period of time. You do one search for your whole website, and each and every URL is inserted into the same graphs.
Real-time data
You get real-time data based on real-time user measurements. Not old data based on bots. The data you receive is based upon what an actual human user of your site will experience.
With previous speed reporting sites, this has always been a huge flaw.
More comprehensive data
Other speed-checkers offer data with many gaps. But patchy data is of no use. Google’s offerings are much more full and comprehensive.
What can I check with this data?
It’s all quite simple to analyse. All of your pages are marked and colour-coded as either ‘slow,’ ‘moderate,’ or ‘fast’.
These pages are also classified by time, so you can see the periods in which your site and pages have performed more slowly or quickly.
Page response time is also separated into two different categories:
- FCP (First Contentful Paint) – the amount of time it takes for the initial content to load on a page. The longer this takes, the more likely users are to click away.
- FIP (First Input Delay) – the time elapsed between someone clicking on something and the browser reacting. If this takes a while, people get irritated.
Okay, some of my pages are slow. What next?
You’ve taken the first step to fixing them. Google offers recommendations on how to do this, which you can follow. Or you might have your own system.
You can then make these changes and keep using Google’s Speed Reports to observe the effects.
So, although it’s only in beta, Google’s new tool is a great improvement on what came before. To test the speed of your URLs, check it out.