Google recently snuck in a new beta feature to Pagespeed: User Experience.
While the new score sheet doesn’t actually have an impact on how pagespeed scores are calculate - nor do pagespeed scores really have an impact on a website’s overall search rank yet - the new additions do however highlight where Google are heading in terms of mobile search. Typical Google crawls don’t carry out the same in-depth analysis as Pagespeed, but the new user experience checks could be used to eliminate incompatible or badly formatted sites from mobile search results.
The tests are pretty base, and unless you have a solid, justifiable reason for making your mobile experience shitty, you should be striving to maintain perfection over these metrics. I was pretty surprised to find more than half of my visitors did so on a mobile or tablet device, as I do most of my considered browsing on my big beautiful Retina Macbook…
Keeping tabs on your site’s loading performance does have an impact on user experience. The average loading time for a site on mobile is ten seconds, when we know that half of us won’t bother with that thing we tapped on Facebook after just three seconds which is a real shame. And the cruel thing is that most sites can optimize in some way. You might not believe it, but this page used to take 12 seconds on average to complete it’s entire loading process. It wasn’t even a pretty loading process as well… Now, the typical load time of someone who’s never swung by before is just under 5 seconds, with the majority of content usually displaying after two. I force the social buttons and plugins wait until the end, so while five seconds may still be over our little three second rule, the more human “percieved” loading time is signifigantly less.
Better still, if this isn’t the first time you’ve browsed my loopy musings, you’ve already downloaded 90% of the content required already. Page loads are virtually instantanious in this case, thanks to clever caching and the use of the rather terrifying appcache system that enables offline navigation when the train goes through the tunnel.
Give Pagespeed a try, and see how well your site does. I looked at my site’s performance really pedantically, which is why it sits at a score of 98 on mobile and 96 on desktop typically. A score of 80 or more however is a good site.
comments powered by