Google giving clearer definition of website speed

[Tony Wang]

...and how it affects SEO. Finally. Looks like plenty of time for folks to tweak their sites before it gets implemented (in 2021). Core Web Vitals is what they call it, I noticed the metrics in webpagetest recently but didn't think much of it until I saw this announcement.

Evaluating page experience for a better web

We’re introducing page experience as a new ranking signal that provides a holistic picture of the quality of a user’s experience on a web page.

webmasters.googleblog.com

 

[djbaxter]

Google On How It Measures Web Vitals

Googlebot (or Lighthouse, or PageSpeed Insights) measures *lab data*, which is hypothetical performance data in a pretty ideal environment. This isn't representative of what actual users see - but that's more important...

So Google Search looks for a mix of lab data and real user metrics (rUM, e.g. the Chrome UX report) to determine performance signals. You wanna take a look at both, too.

Lab data gives you a good idea where to dig deeper, rUM is harder to get & gives you a better perspective.

And that's the cool thing about the GSC web vitals report - it shows you limited data (b/c not every URL might have enough rUM data) but it's real user metrics! So if something is "poor" there, it means real users suffered. You wanna fix that for sure.

 

[djbaxter]

Google Confirms Site Speed Is A Tiny Ranking Factor
Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable
April 29, 2010

I've been saying this for years but now Google has confirmed that the site speed ranking signals are a small, even "teeny tiny" ranking factor in Google search. Gary Illyes from Google said on Twitter "ranking wise it's a teeny tiny factor."

He equated it to the HTTPS ranking factor, saying it is given almost the same weight of the HTTPS signal. He said "very similar to https ranking boost" in terms of how important it is to ranking. ....

Of course, site speed is important to your users and your conversions - but for Google ranking, it is small.

We said in the past that only super slow pages would be impacted. But John Mueller said recently Google might look to make the speeds more granular. But would that change anything?

Read more...

 

[djbaxter]