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Does pagespeed or GTMetrix scores matter ? Lousy scores but fast website ?
Posted by on May 30, 2020 at 5:35 amFunny thing is google page speed and GTMetrix gives me terrible scores yet none of my friends and I experience ANY poor page experiences or slow loads. In fact, trying to solve those issues that we are “recommended to fix” siply gave my website problems and **SLOWED IT DOWN** compared to DOING NOTHING at all. The actual user experience and scores don’t add up.
I have asked all of my friends to test it out from their home WiFi, 4G telecom providers and public WiFi like starbucks and my website is still functioning fast and fine. This involved different computers, different phones, different browsers and different internet service provider. Links were clicked from social media, forums, google and even directly to the site itself.
THEY ALL LOADED INCREDIBLY FAST compared to what these “speed test” websites tell us. Adding any plugins or trying to fix the issues to improve the scores and “fix” the problems always made my website slower in reality.
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2 Replies
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“speed test” websites I imagine empty their cache or set up their test browsers to not cache websites, and also have waiting times to test if there is a queue. So it may seem like they are taking a long time to test your site compared to your POV.
Does it matter for SEO? It is only one of the metrics that Google looks at, many of the biggest websites have shitty loading times and are not optimized. So no it is not the most important factor, it is just one of them.
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Imagine owning a brick and mortar store. You get loads of friends to secret shop at different times of day and they all tell you they had a great experience. Then you hire an expert secret shopper who tells you it was a disaster. Would you ignore the secret shopper?
Page speed is really important and not important at all. Yes Google uses it as a ranking factor, and if Google assesses your site and 3x slower then the best people in your niche, it can cause you issues (as an example). But is it the most important thing for you to work on? That’s for you to decide.
However, there is also the issue of your visitors. What if other people really are seeing the slow times reported by the speed tools? Do you sell an image heavy product and people are leaving because the images take too long to load? Are people leaving before analytics ever even knows they were there because the js doesn’t get round to loading before they get bored and go to a competitor?
So, do those scores matter? Yes, no and sometimes.
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