Lies. Damned Lies. Page Speed.

PERFORMANCE AND SEARCH

With apologies to Mark Twain. Apparently everybody and her brother has just discovered Google PageSpeed. Aabout once a week now I get a call from someone asking me to 'make my PageSpeed score higher!' Which is good. Annnnnnd not so good.

Ya Can't Win 'Em All

It's good to want your web site to run faster, right? (Most of my ads have a line "I'm particularly good at making slow web sites run fast!") And Google is like the Swiss Army Knife of the Interwebs. So it's logical to assume that PageSpeed would be yet another great tool to help laypeople make their web sites perform better. But I'm also sure you've heard the expression "Ya can't win 'em all." See in its current form, PageSpeed, like many self-help tools, can be extremely misleading. So while I'm glad that it gets my phone ringing, I'm not convinced it's doing so for the right reasons.

False Alarms

One beef I have with PageSpeed is that it falsely identifies problems that aren't problems. For example, if you have a Wordpress® site you'll get lots of warnings about technical terms like "javascript" and "css minifying" which likely have almost zero effect on your site's performance. The PageSpeed algorithm 'sees' that these files are not 'optimized'. And that would be a problem if your site got 10,000 hits a day. But you don't. You get 100 hits a day. PageSpeed isn't sophisticated enough to recognize that the impact for your site is almost nil. In other words, PageSpeed currently has a 'one-size-fits-all' algorithm.

You Can't Fix That

A related issue is that many of these recommendations simply cannot be fixed (or rather they could be fixed, but not without more work than you'd want to pay.) If you have a small Wordpress® site on shared hosting, you likely don't have access to the tools to make the changes it recommends (even if you had the technical acumen.) And again, PageSpeed's advice matters far more for larger sites with a lot more control (and dollars) than you will likely ever have.

Trust Yourself

So the real question is this: does your web site actually feel slow? Just because PageSpeed says your site is slow, that doesn't mean it actually is performing poorly. I think some people think that PageSpeed is like some test for cancer: finding hidden 'sickness' that will one day ruin your site. If so, you've been watching too much Grey's Anatomy. Tests that come back as 'false positives' cause a lot of people a lot of needless anxiety. Rule Of Thumb: If your site feels fast, it probably is fast.

But Still...

Of course, for all my grousing, performance does matter. I hate a slow web site and I'm sure you do as well. But ironically, performance is one of those things that small site owners tend not to pay much attention to until some big entity like Google comes along and demands attention. I actually find this odd because I view your web site in the way a fisherman would. If you have only a few fish on the line every day, you need to make the most of every bite!

Google Cares...

However, if my fishy psychological arguments won't reach you, there is this: Google now factors performance into your search ranking. In other words, your search results rank lower than they should if your site is 'seen' as performing poorly. Yes, it's another way that Google is nudging site owners towards having quality sites. And I am only too happy to see this because far too much of the web is still pretty crappy! So you do need to have a fast site, if only to have a site that ranks well in searches. It's just that PageSpeed is not always the metric you should use to judge 'fast'.

The Solution?

Hey, this is my newsletter so you had to know the answer is somewhat self-serving, right? Hire me to do a quick check. I'll give you the straight scoop. And I'll make corrections that will make a visible difference--not just checking off items on Google's list that don't actually benefit your visitors. Because, at the end of the day, the goal is to give your visitors the best possible experience, right? And current best practice means having a guy like me periodically give your site a proper evaluation.

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Like I always say,, I know you're busy. Hopefully my occasional nags help you think about ways to improve your marketing. But even if you don't have a thing for me to work on at present (shocking but possible) drop me a line anyway and let me know how things are going; market-wise or otherwise. It's always good to hear from you!

Best,

JC'S KEY IDEAS FOR APRIL 2017

• Google Now Considers Speed Into Ranking
  Many users now use a social media platform like Facebook or Twitter as their primary portal to the web.
• PageSpeed Is Useful, But Far From Perfect
  Self-help tools like Google PageSpeed are great, but often not particularly accurate so take their results with a large grain of salt. Use their reports only as a first step in making performance improvements.
• The Human Touch Matters
  If your site looks fast? It probably is fast. You need an actual human professional to evaluate and tune your web site for best performance!

mail@jchwebdev.com

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© 2017