Let’s start this blog openly and honestly, Google is the biggest player in the search engine game. Their products have a much greater reach than they did 20 years ago when the only way to search for things was on your desktop or laptop. Now you can find out what time your local pizza shop opens by using a personal home assistant! You don’t need to type! The future is definitely here.
At Hush Digital we build stunning, bespoke websites built to each of our client’s individual needs. We don’t use templates or any off the shelf systems, meaning each website has the exact specification required by our clients.
And as our websites are all built from scratch, they are all inherently different. Like you, they are unique. You won’t find the same website again anywhere in the world. Yes, design elements follow current trends and styles and as times change, so do these designs. But when you see a Hush website, you are looking at something that no one else in the world will have. Bespoke design, bespoke code and bespoke build.
Regardless of the client, their industry or requirements, we build each website with the current standards and best practice applied, meaning a brand new Hush website is like driving a swish new car off the forecourt.
One thing we always keep in mind when building a new website is how well it will perform once it is launched and beyond. This means making sure your website is fast and will deliver the relevant information to your users in a quick enough time that they won’t navigate away. But how do you measure your websites speed to make sure the speed of your website is good enough? One of the things you might do is head over to Google PageSpeed Insights and enter your URL, imagine a drumroll and await the results.
What you’ll get is a mark our of 100 on your website’s mobile and desktop speed, and list of recommendations depending on what Google thinks you should do to improve your websites speed. At this point, you might feel one of two ways; thrilled that your 6-year-old website’s score has lit up green and now you can rest easy or, a bit underwhelmed that your 1-year-old website’s score isn’t quite what you expected it to be and you find yourself thinking “What are all of these red and orange warnings??”
Some clients ask us why their PageSpeed grade isn’t higher, and ask what they can do to help that figure move up a few more spaces on their screens and flash up green. Yeah, there are a few things you can do to make your score jump to by one or two points, but the truth of the matter is it doesn’t completely matter. That’s right your Google PageSpeed Insights score doesn’t matter. Here is why.
Google PageSpeed Insights Speed
Speed (the time it takes for your website to load) is the most important metric to pay attention to when it comes to your website. This, as well as your websites perceived performance, are the only factors to pay attention to when expecting good results for your website user experience as well as your SEO.
Performance of a website is important and can be the difference between losing a customer to a competitor and receiving more website conversions. Perceived performance refers to how fast a website feels to the user who is using it. When it comes to optimising your website, it’s what real-world user experience the user will be faced with which counts, whilst any technical wizardry and PageSpeed scores should come second. Take a look at these tests we did for example:
Tech giant, and most valuable company in the world, Apple scored an 83/100 on Googles PageSpeed insights test. Now most people after looking at their score might only focus on the big number at the top of the page as a judge for their whole website’s speed and performance. But Google tests a lot more than just your website speed to come up with this number. The only data you want to be looking at when it comes to the Google PageSpeed Insights test is your website’s “Speed Index” and “Time to Interactive” (TTI).
Speed Index measures how quickly content is visually displayed during page load, while TTI measures how long it takes for a page to become fully interactive, which is all that really matters when it comes to having a fast website. Especially since when Google bots crawl your website when determining a ranking position for your website in its search engine, they pay less attention to your score and more attention to your websites actual load time.
If loading speed of your website design is something that you heavily rely on we’d recommend using your users’ perceived performance reviews as a better tool at judging your load time. After all, there is no better tool to test your website’s loading speed than the people who the website is built for. All you need is an easy to implement user feedback from somewhere on your website, and a scale of 1 to 10 in which your users can provide their feedback on.
Need help or advice on your website loading speed? Get in touch with the team at Hush Digital and or team of developers can give your website and look over and provide any useful information which will help you improve your website speed.
