Site Speed: What SEOs Need to Know



In this special episode of Ask Google Webmasters, John is joined by Martin Splitt, Webmasters Trend Analyst at Google, as they discuss questions around site speed and SEO, such as:
– What is the ideal page speed of any content for better ranking on SERP? (submitted by @rsthakur1988) (0:21)

– If a website’s mobile speed using the Test My Site tool is good and GTmetrix report scores are high, how important are high Google PageSpeed Insights scores for SEO? (submitted by @olgatsimaraki) (1:27)

– I am testing an almost empty page on devtools Audits (v5.1.0) it usually gives minimum results which 0.8ms for everything and 20ms for FID but sometimes it gives worse results in TTI, FCI and FID. Same page, same code. Why? (submitted by @onurcelik66) (2:49)

– What is the best metric(s) to look at when deciding if page speed is “good” or not? Why / why not should we focus on metrics like FCP / FMP instead of scores given by tools like PageSpeed Insights? (submitted by @drewmarlier) (4:21)

Useful links related to this episode:
PageSpeed Insights docs → https://goo.gle/2pUA0wF
Lighthouse scoring guide → https://goo.gle/2BS4Wk0
How to think about Speed tools → https://goo.gle/2PpaD0I
What is speed? → https://goo.gle/31Wuxme
How to measure speed → https://goo.gle/2WpPa9h

Send us your questions on Twitter with the hashtag AskGooglebot and your question might be answered!
Google Search Central on Twitter → https://goo.gle/3f4Z0a8

Watch more AskGooglebot episodes → https://goo.gle/2OjWcvS
Subscribe to Google Search Central → https://goo.gle/SearchCentral

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46 thoughts on “Site Speed: What SEOs Need to Know”

  1. I wonder if there is someone who actually has real answers to these questions. After watching the answers of these guys who literally works for Google, I started to doubt :/

  2. I really believe that the higher factor still is Page Rank. In my nich, abbandoned websites still get's higher ranking in the SERP because of the "backlink-page rank thing". Are websites from 2009-2010 that do not even mobile freindly and loads very badly. Those sites have not space at all in other search engines like Bing and Yahoo (but Google is the one "people choosed" to be the main search engine). Ranking in Google still is a mistery to me and i really try to be the best in what i do following the directives for content…

  3. You just don't answer anything in any vid o!! You talk about responsive, speed,… And Google tools like search console is not responsive. Even the apply button on computers has same colour on text as background. What kind of lesson are you giving to the rest? Do your work first!! And explain how it works clearly. Some of us would be fired if we act like that.

  4. I'm actually quite disturbed by this type of video – this is the main reason we have so many "fake SEO experts" (scammers) out there, ripping off our clients with garbage SEO plans, garbage SEO work, charging money while delivering no results. If Google treats this subject as a joke like this, how are our clients supposed to find meaningful insights into how to hire and evaluate SEO's that work on their sights. Is this the best you have Google? #fail

  5. This is helpful in getting started on trying to solve the troublesome speed issue. Good to introduce FCP and FIT. You need to be more certain about this because we are trying hard to help you with your speed request. You need to offer more guidance on speeding up WordPress websites which are the problem. People want deep content and that means slow loading. More clarity is needed.

  6. Insights tool ALWAYS shows a much longer load time than what is actual load time. Testing my site (hosted in Toronto and serving to a Toronto device) loads in less than a second. PageSpeed always comes back with 3+ seconds load time. If Google is using that time to penalize my site's rankings this NEEDS to be addressed.

    Looking at both GA and the new site speed data in Search Console report no data and always have. Even Google support is unable to determine why GA has no page speed data.

    Something is seriously screwed up with this metric and being this metric is super important, why isn't anything being done to correct it!!!!!!!!

  7. Hi i would like to know which is more important for a publication website rank in the "Top Stories" section (if any), i.e. Fully loaded time or First Contentful Paint, First Meaningful Paint. thanks

  8. Now, considering GoogleBot doesn't submit forms or really interact, what's the metrics it looks for then? Aside from that, although there is just really bad / really good – there must be a value where you say it starts to be either one, right? Speed is hard, of course. Comparing websites with each other is even harder. For example an Elementor website usually has more work to do for rendering due to the the huge amount of nodes while a plain and solid html, hand coded or via Oxygenbuilder for example, has less nodes and therefor less work to render. At the end, the content may be the same for the user in terms of what they where looking for. When it comes to the user, if he's looking for something specific, some may remember derBauer (is this still a thing?) where waiting for a minute made us even more interested in what's going to happen once it's finally loaded, he may not even care if there is some sort of delay.

  9. how does google figure out which content is important and which is not, many big site are ranking in first page of google even if there content is not even related, and many small sites having matched content to querys are ranking in 2nd or 3rd page of google.

  10. GT Metrix isn't a Google owned tool and uses and older Page Speed Insights API version. 
    Google's Pagespeed Insights uses Lighthouse's API
    Lighthouse would probably itself be the best tool to test with to see what Google thinks. 
    The latest version of Lighthouse can be found at: http://web.dev/measure

    "At Google we aim for under a half-second." – Maile Ohye, 2010

  11. Great episode! Important topic and the way you've answered the questions is really great 😀 I like the "funny touch" of the video, keep up the good work and keep inviting Martin. He sounds like a really nice guy to hang out with 🙂

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