The loading speed is clearly one of the key factors in the user experience. I’m sure you’ve read it many times or heard it in different podcasts from the most relevant players in the SEO sector in our country. But as often happens with these things, sometimes there’s more noise than substance, and solutions, well, few.
The fact is that Google has expressed countless times that loading speed is a key factor for them, so until recently, everyone was optimizing without much success or a bit haphazardly. Cache plugins and other solutions that have been standardized for no particular reason.
The new speed report in Google Search Console
All of this takes on greater relevance now that Google has included a new speed report in its Search Console tool, which allows us to see which URLs are slow, acceptable, and fast. This data is compiled from Pagespeed Insight and Google Chrome usage data. If you already know, when the product is free, the product is you, and Chrome knows more about us and our habits than you think.
But here, the relevant thing is to see at a glance “how Google’s bot sees our site”. And later, you’ll understand why I put that in quotes. If we stick to the report itself, it doesn’t offer a lot of information, but it does offer what’s necessary to take action. What it does is divide the indexed URLs into three categories: “Fast, moderate, and slow”. And within that, you can see how each one performs, since in addition to giving us a quick diagnosis, we can see its performance in terms of speed thanks to the Pagespeed Insight report.
The new speed report.
Why is speed so important on my website?
You’ll probably read that it’s because the reader will spend more time on it; but that’s not entirely true. While it’s true that a slow website drives visitors away (especially on mobile), there are other factors that make the user stay or leave. Sometimes for Google, a website can be slow if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, and if the content is good, the reader will likely overlook that.
Here, we need to talk about the reality for SEOs and webmasters: the faster your website loads, the more pages Google’s bot will crawl and index. If the robot can crawl 30 pages instead of 25, it’s a success for a project, not only because it will detect changes and implementations more quickly but also because it will collect better data. So, yes, it’s important for the visitor, but also for the webmaster.
You can see how the fast URLs perform.
Should I obsess over my website’s speed?
It’s never recommended to obsess over anything, really. In this case, as webmasters, we’re interested in both the visitor and Google’s bot moving quickly through the website, but this shouldn’t keep us up at night. At the end of the day, sometimes there are things that are beyond our control that penalize us in tests.
Additionally, sometimes prioritizing speed means reducing features that you consider interesting for your visitors and your business. Therefore, if the problem you detect in this report is severe, contact an expert. If not, don’t spend too much time trying to shave off a few seconds.