How to use Google PageSpeed Insights

Mark Shaver
Mark Shaver
Google PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights Logo

Google PageSpeed Insights shows the loading speed of the website. The service is very easy to use. No registration is required.

Table of Contents

How to get

Click a link to the Google PageSpeed Insights. Enter the address of your website or page. In 20-30 seconds you will receive the report.

Google PageSpeed Insights report provides tens of parameters. The investor only needs to know 3 main parameters:

Google SpeedTest 90% rule

All parameters relate to the loading speed of website mobile version because most visitors look at the wesite through a smartphone.

Color Zone

For a novice website owner, it's enough to see the color zone of the website performance for analysis:

  • The red zone is bad, you need to take immediate action to speed up the loading of the website
  • The yellow zone is tolerable, if the website has the same visitors. They're willing to wait. But if you are investing in digital marketing and the website is constantly receiving new visitors, then the yellow zone is not suitable for you. You have to accelerate the loading of the website.
  • The green zone is great. You've done a good job. Now your website is ready for digital marketing. You can buy PPC, publish articles, do SEO

The color zones can also help you check the performance of the websites of digital marketing professionals, web developers,... If their websites are in the red zone, you might want to look for other professionals who understands the importance of a fast website loading.

Percentage of visitors retained

More advanced investors can use the number that Google PageSpeed Insights indicates in the circle. This is the percentage of visitors who have the patience to wait until the end of a website loading. Below the number, Google PageSpeed Insights gives a correspondence between the three color zones and the percentage of retained visitors.

The visitor retention rate will help you track how it grows as you invest in speeding up your website. You can ask developers to build you a website with the retention rate you want. This is usually 90% performance or better. But be prepared that:

  • 90% of developers will refuse to make a website with a 90% score on the Google PageSpeed
  • Another 9% of developers will undertake to make a website, they will take an advance payment, but they will make a website with only 50-60% performance
  • Only 1% of website developers will give you their sample websites with 90% performance or better.

Full load time

The "Time to Interactive" parameter is of interest to the most curious investors. This is the time the mobile version of page is fully loaded, when it's ready to respond to any actions of the visitor. Visitor retention on the website is determined by the website load time. Visitors to a website wait 1 second to load. For every additional second that loads, 10% of the remaining visitors leave the website.

All other parameters of Google PageSpeed are of interest only to website developers. Don't spend time studying them.

Links

You may also like: