What’s in a Page Speed Test?
This isn’t a takedown, but it is what I will call a nuancing. There’s so much information flying around about digital; today, yesterday, tomorrow…And I get frustrated that the organizations who are supposed to be reputable sources, curators, discerners of taste, educators, don’t work harder to add nuance and context to splashy headlines and digital eye-candy.
Don’t have time for this whole article? Here’s the TL;DR
- Use a variety of tools
- Don’t put too much stock into the exact score from any one tool
- Test using various connection speeds and devices
- Performance is a feature and must be weighed against other strategic goals
“Be friendly and test how well your site performs on mobile with Google’s diagnostic tool.”
I’ve seen this tool posted up on several large digital agency websites recently. Great, we trust Google, the tool looks slick. But wait, when we test youtube.com/watch it gets a POOR rating for speed. And desktop speed is only fair…The New York Times mobile speed is poor and so is desktop! What is going on here? What about NPR? Their mobile speed comes back poor too, and their desktop speed is only fair.
So what gives? Well, we at Threespot are going to try to add some nuance to what this tool is and isn’t because we help our clients build and deliver fast, accessible, responsive, beautiful websites day in and day out. In fact, we’ve been doing this whole responsive thing since 2011.
Google has strong opinions about how a page or site should load CSS and if you don’t do it the way they want you to they mark you down. At Threespot, we use a variety of tools to test. One tool, WebPagetest offers you the option to specify a test location, browser, connection speed and many other details to get a better sense of how your site performs under different conditions. We also use a Google test tool, and we use the Speed Index which is another really great tool.
Unfortunately, ThinkWithGoogle’s tool doesn’t offer a fuller picture in terms of how your site will load in different locations, on different devices, with varying connection speeds. At Threespot, we also test on real devices which is ALWAYS better than emulators.
Another interesting fact, some of the warnings you may have received if you ran your site through that tool are warnings due to loading Google Analytics. That seems like a head scratcher…
So clearly we have to take this type of tool with a grain of salt. And you want to know what else? You can’t beat human testing. Humans perceive speed in different ways than a tool can test and there are often tricks that developers will use to help get content on a page in a way that a user perceives the quickness of a site even if there are still larger assets that need to be loaded.
Finally, Google can’t take into account a client’s speed budget — do you need to reach international audiences in low bandwidth areas? Do you need to deliver high-resolution images of artwork for auction? Etc.
There are certain things that Google wants us to take into account that increase development time and make a site harder to maintain in the long run. And if we all followed Google’s opinions on these matters, users on slow connections would benefit, but not everyone (especially non-profit organizations) has the money and resources to throw at building and maintaining sites. And often these organizations don’t need to build sites like this to serve their primary audiences.
As digital continues to evolve and Google maintains their dominant and influential role shaping that future that we will all share in, it is important to remember that not everyone who is communicating digitally needs to reach audiences in Malawi, although the Better Than Cash Alliance does and that’s one reason why we worked with them to optimize for speed. Google’s release of AMP might have something else to do with their emphasis on page speed.
Resources:
Cool stuff WebpageTest can do:
http://deanhume.com/Home/BlogPost/ten-things-you-didnt-know-about-webpagetest-org/10145
Performance needs to involve the whole team:
https://speakerdeck.com/katiekovalcin/the-path-to-performance
Good reads on how humans perceive performance:
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/09/why-performance-matters-the-perception-of-time/
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/10/rail-user-centric-model-performance/
Some possible UX issues caused by current best practices:
http://molily.de/mobile-web-performance/
“But good performance has a cost too: development cost.”
https://medium.com/@sachagreif/the-cost-of-performance-4132b6559fe4
How to sell performance to clients:
http://alistapart.com/article/performance-showing-versus-telling
