How to read Google Pagespeed Reports: Google’s Insanity Explained

Why does my mobile page speed suck?!

One question we get a lot, like a whole lot, is why their Google Mobile Pagespeed scores are so low. Their site is fast, and everything is super snappy, but Google claims that their Mobile Pagespeed is in the gutter. Today we’re going to explain why that is, why it’s wrong, and what we can do about it.

First and foremost we need to understand that nobody tells Google what to do. They’re going to do whatever they want for no reason other than because they can. When you’re a company with a motto “don’t be evil”, and you explicitly change your motto to NOT be that anymore… do I really need to say more? They’re the undisputed royalty of the internet, and it’s not a good thing, but it’s a thing that we have to contend with at every turn in our digital lives.

Pagespeed – How is it calculated? What are its standards?

Desktop

So first let’s look at Pagespeed in general – the Desktop version. This assumes a fairly low end speed of 10Mbit. The cable connection I’m currently using, even over Wifi, is boasting a whopping 730Mbits, but – sure – some people are probably on DSL, so I can accept 10Mbit as a reasonable limit. The speeds (or lack thereof) are always a bit exaggerated because of that limited connection throughput, but it’s close enough.

Mobile

Mobile Pagespeed, however, takes things to a whole other level of absurdity. Their cap for Mobile Pagespeed is 1.6Mbit. That’s a little outdated as this chart (borrowed from Kens Tech Tips) shows:

The majority of our, and likely your, website visitors live in places where 4G+ speeds are available (45-60Mbit “real world” speed), and are not limited to the maximum speeds of a mid-range 3G cellular tower. Google’s 1.6Mbit is closest to HSPA, a cellular network that went out of fashion in North America in 2010 in favour of HSPA+ and DC-HSPA+. When was the last time you were using a 3G connection? Likely not in this decade. And if you were, it probably wasn’t for long and few things loaded fast *anyway*, meaning if your site is a bit slow on that phone, it would be just another site alongside many other slow loading sites – the user would be accustomed to it.

Conclusions

If you and your website visitors are in an area that has modern cellular infrastructure, you can ignore Google’s mobile Pagespeed report. Focus completely on the Desktop report. This makes sense to do because the limited speeds being used for the Desktop test are far closer to you – and your visitors’ – slowest mobile speeds. Except perhaps when deep into the woods and your signal is so low your Internet barely works at all.

Some people will tell you that you MUST make Google’s mobile page speed happy or else Google will punish you. Instead, I’ll suggest that you build websites for yourself and your audience, not for a faceless corporate entity that doesn’t care about you or your project. Google will eventually build up their real-world data-set for your site, depending on your traffic levels, and will re-grade your speed based on that data – not the arbitrary (and entirely fictitious) “lab numbers” that they generate.

Having said that, if you absolutely must ensure your site loads super fast on the limited speeds that mobile page speed requires, that can be done by sacrificing elements (typically visual elements) of your site. Here’s how:

1. Eliminate all videos from the site
2. Ensure you have at most 2 photos on any given page, and compress them to be no more than 25kb each. Have larger photos? Remove them. Need higher quality? You’re out of luck – and you can blame Google for that.
3. Do not use external fonts like Google Fonts – stick with system fonts like Helvetica and Times. Or don’t even specify a particular font – go with an entire class of fonts like “sans-serif”, allowing the fonts to be selected by the browser.
4. Do not use icons anywhere on your site – stick to purely text
5. Do not use display ad networks – only host your own ads, and ensure they are either text based, or extermely well compressed images
6. Do not use a contact form, becuase you will need a CAPTCHA service to prevent bots from sending spam through it, and those CAPTCHA services all require additional resources that a slow connection cannot handle in a timely manner