Making your website load faster

Explanation

We often encounter clients who wish to improve their Google PageSpeed Insights (GPSI) rating, and they consider the points they receive on desktop or mobile devices to be the most important metric.

However, Google PageSpeed points are actually an aggregate score, generated by the Google’s Lighthouse algorithm based on six key page performance metrics

• First Contentful Paint (FCP): time when content is first painted.
• Speed Index (SI): load speed index.
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): the time it takes to paint the first large piece of content on the first page.
• Time to Interactive (TTI): load time until interactivity is enabled.
• Total Blocking Time (TBT).
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much website elements move during loading (percentage).

Each of these parameters are gauged in seconds and has its own weight when calculating the total score, which is displayed after Google Page Speed scans your website. The algorithm behind each Lighthouse parameter and the weight of each metric are constantly being updated. This means that your rating may improve or decline even if you don’t update your website.

НFor instance, June 2021 saw an update to the Lighthouse algorithm — specifically the relationship between the metrics and the GPSI score. The image below shows the rating before June 2021 (versions 6 and 7) and after the start of June 2021 (version 8).

Google also emulates page loads based on the specifications of the Motorola Moto G4 phone with a 2014 CPU and 2 GB of RAM. In practice, most smartphone users in Russia have newer devices, meaning that the real page load speed will be higher.

Explanation

On May 28, 2020, Google announced an updated ranking algorithm that takes the website’s usability — or rather the Core Web Vitals (CWV) factors — into account. Those factors include 3 out of the 6 metrics used by the Lighthouse engine for GPSI: LCP, FID, and CLS. On April 19, 2021, Google announced that the algorithm changes will come into effect in June 2021.

Because of this, there were a lot of conclusions being drawn online, such as that having a “green” Page Speed rating is now vital for high site ranking. In reality, this is not a very important factor, and this has been corroborated in an article by Google:

As already pointed out, our goal is to bring attention to the pages that users find easy to use. However, this is only one of the many factors considered in Google ranking. With all that said, this makes changes to your Google ranking unlikely.

Lead Google engineer and search quality analyst Gary Ilsh left a Reddit comment, sharing that the CWV factors are very unlikely to ever become the key ingredients to SEO ranking.

Explanation

Unscrupulous actors can abuse one of the following methods to gain 90 or more points for their page of choice:

• Using user-agent to track Google bots and feed them only text-based content with images and no styles or scripts, leading to a score of 100. This method will very likely lead to ranking sanctions on the part of Google.
• Delaying the loading of a large share of heavy-load content and blocking traffic, leading to a much higher score. However, this will also lead to very slow load speeds for real users.
• Sacrificing image quality to boost your score, forgoing resolution optimization, and lazy-loads in order to cut on extra work.

There are many more ways to cheat. What we offer are real, honest solutions that speed up the website for both bots and real users.