Page speed - what do you aim for?
-
Hi Mozzers - was just looking at website speed and know the google guidelines on average page load time but I'm not sure whether Google issues guidelines on any of the other 4? Do you know of any guidance on domain lookup, server response, server connection or page download?
Page Load Time (sec) - I tend to aim for 2 seconds max: http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/your-website-design-should-load-in-4-seconds/
Server Response Time: [Google recommends 200ms]: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/Server Redirection Time (sec) [dependent on number of redirects so probably no guide figure]
Domain Lookup Time (sec)
Server Connection Time (sec)
Page Download Time (sec)Thanks, Luke
-
IMHO, if somebody is paying us for SEO, then our GOAL is to get the homepage to load in a second or less.... especially if most of the users are mobile. If it's mid 1 second, then we can grudgingly live with that.
I'm glad you asked about server response times.... for most sites, after the content is optimized ( smaller images, clunky code, etc...) the initial server response time is usually the culprit for getting over a second.... as long as the rest of the home page is "light". Light to us is under 1MB. Depending on your CMS, there are a variety of ways to get the response time to be 200ms or less.
Google Pagespeed, as David said, is a good measurement, but it's not the holy grail of measurements. We use it only to identify areas that need improvement. Waterfalls tell us what's taking so long and what's heavy.
You didn't ask about plugins - which is a major culprit to caching, minify errors, conflicts, speed and weight. We limit all active plugins to TEN (including caching, SEO, security). For some sites, plugin clean up is the easiest way to speed up a site.
At the end of the day, nothing beats clean code, light images and a lightening fast server.
-
Thanks for all the feedback everyone - much appreciated, Luke
-
As long as the page loads quick for users then I wouldn't put a huge focus on this. True that Google looks at page load speed, but I wouldn't put all your eggs in that basket. We have sites that show a 2.5-3.5 second load time, and they still dominate ranking results. Focus on creating a better experience.
One of the simple ways to speed up load times is to minify and compress CSS and Javascript files as small as possible, but be sure to check that the minification does not break areas of the site. We have seen improvements as high as 75% just from completing this step alone.
If you have a Joomla or WordPress website, here is a great plugin that will do this for you: https://www.jch-optimize.net/
-
Hi Luke! When using this tool (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/) we aim to have our clients above 80 for both mobile and desktop.
-
I will be honest, I don't trust Google with PageSpeed. There are too few questions asked about how it actually fits in with the metrics and what is used. One example is Google says resources like Google Analytics do not count against your score in the SERPS. But in the test they do. If you use several Google assets like Adwords, Analytics, fonts, ect; you will show a very low score. Using them will actually block you from seeing other things that you can fix.
What we have started doing is figuring out what Google actually needs and presenting it to them. We started hiding tracking codes from Google. Bing, Facebook, ect from them. We hide our analytics tracking script from Google's crawler. I figured out that Google's test servers have the FA library and also their font library locally on the machine, so we have started hiding those from it as well. Any 3rd party script we have that Google does not need to see has been hidden as well, segmentify, olark, anything really. Doing these things has raised our score quite a bit.
-
"if you have 2 or even 3 redirects mobile users wait for 5 seconds before see anything. Hint - that's why i won't click on most bit.ly, ow.ly, goo.gl links in Twitter, Facebook, G+ when i'm on mobile. Because they first pass via t.co redirect then redirect that i can see and sometime even 3rd redirect."
Just adding a bit of weight to what you said, here's a test of a t.co link through bit.ly: https://i.gyazo.com/ca87c486a903914c2b058612cc93f3f0.png on 3g, it's 4.27s to even start loading Google. Without t.co: https://i.gyazo.com/f22c18a0879f76ecf653662153e17c43.png which is 2.35s.
-
Pagespeed score means nothing unfortunately. http/2 puts a spanner in the works for a lot of it.
https://blog.newrelic.com/2016/02/09/http2-best-practices-web-performance/
Being this section:
- Concatenating JavaScript and CSS files: Combining smaller files into a larger file to reduce the total number of requests.
- **Image spriting: **Combining multiple small images into one larger image.
- Domain sharding: Spreading requests for static assets across several domains to increase the total number of open TCP connections allowed by the browser.
- Inlining assets: Bundling assets with the HTML document source, including base-64 encoding images or writing JavaScript code directly inside
-
It's hard to be explained but "Less is MORE!" in general for that numbers.
Examples - redirectors. Redirects can overkill your site specially on mobile users. For that even simply site redirect can took second or two. Example www.example.com -> 301 -> m.example.com; looks simple isn't? But in reality after client took 301 redirect he must make new domain resolving (for m.exmaple.com) and then new connect to new server (m.example.com). And this is simply case... if you have 2 or even 3 redirects mobile users wait for 5 seconds before see anything. Hint - that's why i won't click on most bit.ly, ow.ly, goo.gl links in Twitter, Facebook, G+ when i'm on mobile. Because they first pass via t.co redirect then redirect that i can see and sometime even 3rd redirect. I know that marketers want to see "clicks", but isn't good for mobile users.
Server connection is also need to be less. But this mean that server need to be closer to user. Best example is Australia. There even simply DNS resolving + connection took one second. And client doesn't receive single byte from server yet... You can see WebPageTest.org (there are Australian servers). But of course providing single server there is expensive, so you need to have deep pockets to make servers there. That's why most of companies providing CDN support. Since CDN endpoint is closer to user it make things little bit faster for them. And if CDN is setup correct should be much faster.
So - idea is "Less is More!". The best is if you use WPT to benchmark your site from all over the world. And also setup Analytics to count speed. Because it's different speed when your site is on perfect conditions in datacenter than in real world.
-
Hi Luke,
Here is what google recommends in terms of page speed. Server response time to be less than 200 ms.
Now, coming to the Page Speed tool / Insight that google provide the measure the page speed ratings (1-100) , Google Page Speed score is indeed a strong indicator of a website’s loading performance in terms of time.
As per my research, total website download less than 10 secs corresponds to 75-85 on pagespeed score.
I hope this helps.
Thanks,
Vijay
-
Thanks Tom for picking up on that error - ugh - corrected now. Brain working sluggishly this morning lol!
-
Hi Luke,
"Avg. Page Load Time (sec) [Google recommends 200ms]:" That's actually for the server response time.
Personally, the only thing that matters is that the overall page load time is quick. I aim if possible for sub 2 seconds for any page.
Tom
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Pillar pages and blog pages
Hello, I was watching this video about pillar pages https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db3TpDZf_to and tried to apply it to my self but find it impossible to do (but maybe I am looking at it the wrong way). Let's say I want to rank on "Normandy bike tou"r. I created a pillar page about "Normandy bike tour" what would be the topics of the subpages boosting that pillar page. I know that it should be questions people have but in the tourism industry they don't have any, they just want us to make them dream !! I though about doing more general blog pages about things such as : Places to rent a bike in Normandy or in XYZ city ? ( related to biking) Or the landing sites in Normandy ? (not related to biking) Is it the way to do it, what do you recommend ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Our client's web property recently switched over to secure pages (https) however there non secure pages (http) are still being indexed in Google. Should we request in GWMT to have the non secure pages deindexed?
Our client recently switched over to https via new SSL. They have also implemented rel canonicals for most of their internal webpages (that point to the https). However many of their non secure webpages are still being indexed by Google. We have access to their GWMT for both the secure and non secure pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
Should we just let Google figure out what to do with the non secure pages? We would like to setup 301 redirects from the old non secure pages to the new secure pages, but were not sure if this is going to happen. We thought about requesting in GWMT for Google to remove the non secure pages. However we felt this was pretty drastic. Any recommendations would be much appreciated.0 -
Pagination on a product page with reviews spread out on multiple pages
Our current product pages markup only have the canonical URL on the first page (each page loads more user reviews). Since we don't want to increase load times, we don't currently have a canonical view all product page. Do we need to mark up each subsequent page with its own canonical URL? My understanding was that canonical and rel next prev tags are independent of each other. So that if we mark up the middle pages with a paginated URL, e.g: Product page #1http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692"/>http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=2" />**Product page #2 **http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=2"/>http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692" />http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=3" />Would mean that each canonical page would suggest to google another piece of unique content, which this obviously isn't. Is the PREV NEXT able to "override" the canonical and explain to Googlebot that its part of a series? Wouldn't the canonical then be redundant?Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Don340 -
Putting "noindex" on a page that's in an iframe... what will that mean for the parent page?
If I've got a page that is being called in an iframe, on my homepage, and I don't want that called page to be indexed.... so I put a noindex tag on the called page (but not on the homepage) what might that mean for the homepage? Nothing? Will Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anyone else, potentially see that as a noindex tag on my homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Philip-DiPatrizio0 -
How long takes to a page show up in Google results after removing noindex from a page?
Hi folks, A client of mine created a new page and used meta robots noindex to not show the page while they are not ready to launch it. The problem is that somehow Google "crawled" the page and now, after removing the meta robots noindex, the page does not show up in the results. We've tried to crawl it using Fetch as Googlebot, and then submit it using the button that appears. We've included the page in sitemap.xml and also used the old Google submit new page URL https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url Does anyone know how long will it take for Google to show the page AFTER removing meta robots noindex from the page? Any reliable references of the statement? I did not find any Google video/post about this. I know that in some days it will appear but I'd like to have a good reference for the future. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabioricotta-840380 -
To land page or not to land page
Hey all, I wish to increase my sites rankings on a variety of keywords within sub categories but I'm unsure where to be spending the time in SEO. Here's an example of the website page structure: General Home Page > Sub Category 1 Home Page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DPSSeomonkey
> Searching / Results pages
- Sub Category 1
- Sub Category 2
- Sub Category 3
- Sub Category 4 > Sub Category 2 Home Page
> Searching / Results pages
- Sub Category 1
- Sub Category 2
- Sub Category 3
- Sub Category 4 We've newly introduced the Sub Category Home Pages and I was wondering if SEO is best performed on these pages or should landing pages be built, one for each of the 4 sub categories in each section. Those landing pages would have links to the "Searching / Results pages" for that sub category. Thanks!0 -
Should I redirect secondary keyword page
I have a reasonably high authority home page and have decided to optimise the home page to target a competitive keyword that previously had a specific page that was optimised on an internal page of my site that I have spent time building links to. The internal page has over 200 links to it so should I 301 redirect this internal page to the home page. Will that increase the auhority of the home page further? Or should I keep the internal page as a 'secondary' page for that keyword?. If I do have two pages don't I risk confusing google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Removing a Page From Google index
We accidentally generated some pages on our site that ended up getting indexed by google. We have corrected the issue on the site and we 404 all of those pages. Should we manually delete the extra pages from Google's index or should we just let Google figure out that they are 404'd? What the best practice here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles0