Page Speed

Page Speed

Page Speed Overview

Page Speed is a metric that comes from Google's Page Speed Tool based on Lighthouse lab data and is based on a scoring of 0-100, where 100 is the fastest and 0 is the slowest. Page Speed Data retrieval occurs throughout the period specified (monthly or weekly), which means queries to Google's Pagespeed Insights tool start at the beginning of the period and run throughout the period until data is available for all managed pages.  Learn More


Google Core Web Vitals

As of October 2020 Google announced that three page load metrics are considered Core Web Vitals and will be included in the Page Experience ranking update to be rolled out in May of 2021. Two of those metrics (LCP & CLS) are included in our Page Speed analysis in the Lab Data section, based on Lighthouse, and are listed below:
  1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
  2. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
  3. First Input Delay (FID) cannot be measured by third parties.
FID (First Input Delay) requires a real user and thus cannot be measured in the lab. However, the Total Blocking Time (TBT) metric is lab-measurable, correlates well with FID in the field, and also captures issues that affect interactivity. Optimizations that improve TBT in the lab should also improve FID for your users.

Background & Requirements

  1. Pages need to be managed in the platform which can be done via the Universal Add button. Managed pages can be seen in Page Clarity.
  2. Page Speed options can be found in Settings and allows for the frequency of page speed retrieval to be changed to weekly. This change also requires Page tags and a Google Page Speed API key. More information on the API key can be found here.
  3. Mobile PageSpeed Insights are default in this feature. 
  4. Bot activity will occur from Google up to twice a month for each managed page when the Page Speed insights are retrieved. Google has user agents for mobile, most commonly seen as  below:
    1. Mobile: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Page Speed Insights) Chrome/27.0.1453 Mobile Safari/537.36

Page Speed Use Cases

1. Identify opportunities to improve page speed for mobile device. Learn More

2. Measure improvement changes over time. Learn More

3. Faster times have been shown to correlate with lower bounce rates and are more likely to keep users engaged.


Watch this video for a quick overview of how to evaluate page speed in seoClarity, or scroll down for a more detailed description of this capability.




Page Speed Analysis

A Page Speed Optimization Score of <59 is considered Low (orange), a Score between 60 to 79 is considered Medium (light blue) and >90 is considered Good (dark blue).



Trend & Summary Charts

Speed Score: Displays a summary of the average Page Speed Score for all managed pages based on Google's PageSpeed Insights for Mobile devices. 

Pages: Displays a summary of the count of pages based on whether the page had a Good, Medium or Low PageSpeed Optimization score. 

Page Score: Displays a trend of the PageSpeed score for Mobile, as well as the unique count of pages by month.

Lab Data: Displays the average Page Speed metrics based on Lighthouse. Learn More

      Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Largest Contentful Paint marks the time at which the largest text or image is painted. Learn More
      Interaction to Next Paint (INP): This measures the time it takes for a page to respond to user input (such as clicks or taps) after the initial page load. Learn More
      Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Cumulative Layout Shift measures the movement of visible elements within the viewport. Learn More
      First Contentful Paint (FCP): First Contentful Paint is a score based on measuring when a user sees a visual response from the page. Learn More
      First Input Delay (FID): FID measures the time from when a user first interacts with a web page (i.e., clicks a link, taps a button, or uses a custom control powered by JavaScript) to when the browser is actually able to start processing event-handling scripts in response to the interaction. Learn More
      Time to First Byte (TTFB): This measures the time it takes for the server to respond with the first byte of data after a user requests a web page. Learn More


Page Speed Tables

The two primary data sets for Page Speed are the Issues and Pages tables.

Issues table

This displays the count of pages where an issue was found and the average impact of that issue. A trended view can be toggled optionally.


Columns

Issue: Displays the page speed issue.

Count of Pages: Displays the number of pages where that issue is found.



Pages table

This displays the count of issues for each managed page and the selected lab metrics data. A trended view can be toggled optionally.


Columns 

Page: Displays the managed URLs (as seen in Page Clarity).  
Score: This is the Pagespeed score from 0-100 based on Google's PageSpeed Insights, with the higher number indicating a faster page. 
Issue Count: Displays the number of page speed related issues found for that page.
Lab FCP: First Contentful Paint is a score based on measuring when a user sees a visual response from the page. 
Lab SI: Speed Index shows how quickly the contents of a page are visibly populated. 
Lab TTI: Time to interactive is the amount of time it takes for the page to become fully interactive.
Lab LCP: Largest Contentful Paint marks the time at which the largest text or image is painted. 
Lab TBT: Displays the sum of all time periods between FCP and Time to Interactive, when task length exceeded 50ms, expressed in milliseconds.
Lab CLS: Cumulative Layout Shift measures the movement of visible elements within the viewport.



Page Speed Filters

URL: Filter URLs based on the criteria: is, isn't, contains, does not contain, starts with, ends with, or a Regex pattern.

Issue: Filter for insights based on specific issue(s). Issues are noted below.  

Page Score: Filter the page speed score with criteria: equals, greater than, less than, or between.

Response Code: Filter pages based on the response code of the URL. This selects 200 response codes by default.

  1. 200: Success 
  2. 403: The server understands the request but refuses to authorize it.
  3. 404: The requested page is not available. 
  4. 500: Internal Server Error
  5. 502: Bad gateway. The server, while acting as a gateway or proxy, received an invalid response from the upstream server.
  6. 503: Service unavailable. The server is not ready to handle the request.
  7. 802: Lighthouse returned error: FAILED_DOCUMENT_REQUEST. Lighthouse was unable to reliably load the page you requested. Make sure you are testing the correct URL and that the server is properly responding to all requests. (Details: net::ERR_TIMED_OUT)
  8. 808: Lighthouse returned error: NO_FCP. The page did not paint any content.
  9. 810: :[{"message":"Lighthouse returned error: Something went wrong.","domain":"lighthouse","reason":"lighthouseError"}],
  10. 811: Response is empty.
  11. 814: Lighthouse returned error: PROTOCOL_TIMEOUT
  12. 815: Lighthouse returned error: NOT_HTML. The page provided is not HTML (served as MIME type application/pdf)
  13. 816: Lighthouse returned error: This request took too long to render

Content Type: Filter ages based on multiple criteria using AND OR statements to be saved and reused. 

Exclude Error URL: Filter for just pages where a page speed score was able to be retrieved. Error URLs can include those with response code errors and redirects. This is selected by default. 

Page Tags: Filter for a specific set of pages that have been grouped into a tag. 


PageSpeed Issues Learn More

Avoid landing page redirects: This rule triggers when PageSpeed Insights detects that you have more than one redirect from the given url to the final landing page.
Enable compression: This rule triggers when PageSpeed Insights detects that compressible resources were served without gzip compression.
Improve server response time: This rule triggers when PageSpeed Insights detects that your server response time is above 200 ms.
Leverage browser caching: This rule triggers when PageSpeed Insights detects that the response from your server does not include caching headers or if the resources are specified to be cached for only a short time.
Minify resources: This rules triggers when PageSpeed Insights detects that the size of one of your resources could be reduced through minification.
Optimize images: This rule triggers when PageSpeed Insights detects that the images on the page can be optimized to reduce their filesize without significantly impacting their visual quality.
Optimize CSS Delivery: This rule triggers when PageSpeed Insights detects that a page includes render blocking external stylesheets, which delay the time to first render.
Prioritize visible content: This rule triggers when PageSpeed Insights detects that additional network round trips are required to render the above the fold content of the page.
Remove render-blocking JavaScript: This rule triggers when PageSpeed Insights detects that your HTML references a blocking external JavaScript file in the above-the-fold portion of your page.



Related Platform Sections

Page Clarity: Managed Pages

Clarity Audits: Download Latency