If you’ve tested the speed of your website using tools such as Google Lighthouse or Pagespeed Insights and received a low mobile performance score, it’s likely that you’ve assumed that there is something wrong.
These tools analyse the performance of a website by looking at elements that affect speed and user experience. This could include how long it takes for the first image to load.
These tools score your site on a scale of 0 to 100. Higher scores indicate better performance – or at least, that’s the idea. They consider factors like how fast your page loads and how quickly it responds when users try to interact with it.
They also provide users with suggestions to improve site speed, usability and user experience. In most cases, this score doesn’t accurately reflect how your site really works for most of its users.
Google Lighthouse runs its mobile tests using a simulated slow 3G connection. This is designed to test how a site performs under extreme conditions. This is not meant to test how a website works for most of its users.
In today’s digital world, most people use much faster networks, like 4G or 5G. As a result, the results of these tests are likely to be inaccurate and misleading. Even well-established websites often have poor mobile speed scores.
A study of the top 100 online retailers found that the average mobile site speed score was only 25.9 out of 100.
What this means is that a low score does not necessarily mean your site is doing poorly.
The score can fluctuate based on a host of different reasons. This can include internet speed and even the time of day.
For these reasons, it might make more sense to look at recommendations in tools like Pagespeed Insights, rather than focusing on a number score.
Search engines look at a variety of different on and off-page factors when deciding how to rank a website. This can include, but is not limited to, the quality of content, mobile friendliness and crawlability.
It might be more beneficial to invest time in making improvements to your website to provide users with a better experience rather than striving for the ideal site speed score. This, in turn, can help improve the overall visibility of your site, and help drive visitors.
If you’re not sure where to start, reach out to the team at Engage Web today to see how we can help.
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