WebPerf PageSpeed Google Confirms Chrome Usage Data Used to Measure Site Page Speed

eva2000 · Apr 10, 2018

Interesting for fellow speed addicts and SEO folks that Google confirmed their using Chrome users site speed data + other data sources for evaluating site speed Google Confirms Chrome Usage Data Used to Measure Site Speed. So it isn't related to Google search bot crawler's reported site speed which isn't actually rendering your site pages.

The short version is that Google is now using performance data aggregated from Chrome users who have opted in as a datapoint in the evaluation of site speed (and as a signal with regards to rankings). This is a positive move (IMHO) as it means we don’t need to treat optimizing site speed for Google as a separate task from optimizing for users.

Previously, it has not been clear how Google evaluates site speed, and it was generally believed to be measured by Googlebot during its visits — a belief enhanced by the presence of speed charts in Search Console. However, the onset of JavaScript-enabled crawling made it less clear what Google is doing — they obviously want the most realistic data possible, but it's a hard problem to solve. Googlebot is not built to replicate how actual visitors experience a site, and so as the task of crawling became more complex, it makes sense that Googlebot may not be the best mechanism for this (if it ever was the mechanism).
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Pay attention to users
Importantly, this means that there are changes you can make to your site that Googlebot is not capable of detecting, which are still detected by Google and used as a ranking signal. For example, we know that Googlebot does not support HTTP/2 crawling, but now we know that Google will be able to detect the speed improvements you would get from deploying HTTP/2 for your users.

The same is true if you were to use service workers for advanced caching behaviors — Googlebot wouldn’t be aware, but users would. There are certainly other such examples.

Essentially, this means that there's no longer a reason to worry about pagespeed for Googlebot, and you should instead just focus on improving things for your users. You still need to pay attention to Googlebot for crawling purposes, which is a separate task.
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deltahf · Apr 16, 2018

I wonder if they're going to penalize us for their own slow-loading ads from Adsense.

eva2000 · Jul 25, 2018

Yeah Google Adsense is still slowest part of my site page loading speed - on centminmod.com if enable Adsense page level ads there's up to 121 requests related to ads which account for 60% of the total page size

I have turned off page level ads now and converted centminmod.com to Progressive Web App (PWA) so page speed on repeat visits would be alot faster WebPerf - JS - Progressive Web Apps ?. Over time I should be able to track these site pagespeed improvements in Google Analytics and also show up in Google PageSpeed Insight origin metrics WebPerf - PageSpeed - Your site's Google PageSpeed Insights result?

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