Some of the largest and most successful WordPress websites in the world, such as the Wall Street Journal or People Magazine, perform extremely poorly in Google's PageSpeed Insights. This is despite the fact that their business model depends on good performance. Using the New York Times as an example, I'll explain why you can disregard the PageSpeed optimization score and how your WordPress business can benefit from this insight.

What do the websites of Forbes, Time Magazine, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, People Magazine and Harvard Business Review have in common? They are all major publications with a reach in the millions and corresponding online sales. And they all run on WordPress!

As you can imagine, performance is a hot topic, especially for such large publications. The better the website performs, the better the user signals and the more people read it. This benefits the publication twice over:

• The better the user signals, the more advertising revenue.
• The more people, the better the number of subscribers.

The example of the Financial Times also shows that performance pays off. In 2016, it tested how a delay in loading time of one to five seconds affects reader behavior. The result: the slower the website, the fewer articles are read. The result: reduced advertising revenue and fewer subscriptions taken out. Unsurprisingly, optimizing the loading time was a top priority when the Financial Times website was redesigned around six months later.

However, if you look at the results that Google PageSpeed Insights spits out for the publications mentioned above, it does not appear at first glance that performance optimization plays a major role.

All but two of the publications tested achieved a mobile optimization score in the good range (80-100). The desktop score, however, looks quite different: The PageSpeed Scores of NY Times, HBR and People Magazine are "low", the scores of WSJ, Forbes and Time Magazine are only "medium" and only the New Yorker just makes it into the good range.

What are these "bad results" all about?

The PageSpeed Score has nothing to do with loading speed

Many people believe that the score displayed in PageSpeed Insight (e.g. 60/100) indicates the loading speed of the website. The name of the tool also suggests this. However: "PageSpeed" and "Page Speed" are not the same thing in this case. The optimization score that the tool ultimately outputs has no correlation to the page load time.

You read that correctly: The Google PageSpeed Insights Score describes not the loading time.

Instead, it is checked whether certain measures have been implemented that are considered "best practice" in performance optimization. The implementation of these measures is then rated on a scale from 0 to 100. 

A second myth that persists: A good PageSpeed Score improves your Google ranking. But this is not the case either. Yes, the speed of a website influences its ranking. However, the score that the tool outputs is not taken into account by Google (especially since it doesn't correlate with speed anyway). Therefore, you can largely disregard the Google PSI score when it comes to SEO.

In addition, the page load time, i.e. the time it takes for a website to load completely, is not relevant for the ranking. Instead, Google includes the Time To First Byte (TTFB) value as a factor. This is the time that elapses until the browser receives the first response from the server after an HTTP request. As a rule, this is a matter of milliseconds.

The correlation between TTFB and the ranking could already be proven in 2013 (corresponding articles by MOZ can be found here and here). In contrast, Gary Illyes - a highly respected web trend analyst at Google in the community - publicly announced via Twitter that there was no need to worry too much about page load time.

Case study: The PageSpeed Insights Score of the New York Times

Let's take a closer look at the New York Times as an example. It achieves a PageSpeed Insights score of 84 ("good") on mobile and 52 ("low") on desktop. So what does PageSpeed Insights suggest to improve the loading time? According to Google, the desktop version could benefit from the following measures, among others:

Remove JavaScript and CSS resources that block rendering in content "above the fold" (visible without scrolling)

The background to this suggestion is that JavaScript should normally be loaded in the footer or at least asynchronously. If it is loaded in the header, this can lead to delays as other resources are put on the back burner. In some cases, however, it significantly impairs the functionality of the website if all JavaScript is located in the footer. The effect of this measure on the website must therefore be checked on a case-by-case basis.

And if the CSS resources are only loaded at the end, the entire website is initially built completely without a design - not exactly a pleasant user experience. Of course, it would theoretically be possible to filter out the CSS that is required for the content "above the fold" and integrate it at the top and then load the rest of the stylesheet at the bottom. However, this is virtually impossible to do retrospectively; this trick would have to be taken into account during development. It also means considerable effort during development and ultimately only improves the PageSpeed Score, but not the actual page load time. The effort is therefore probably better invested elsewhere.

Use browser caching

Doesn't sound wrong at first. But if you look at the suggestions for what else could be cached, you will see elements that are not hosted on the NY Times website itself. These include, for example, files that are hosted by Google Analytics or Facebook and are integrated into the NY Times for monitoring purposes. The site operator of the NY Times has absolutely no influence on the cache configuration of these elements - so the suggestion is a waste of time.

Google also criticizes the use of a content delivery network (CDN) - a network of interconnected servers distributed around the world. However, international users in particular benefit from this. A CDN is fundamentally advantageous for performance, as the response time of the server is greatly reduced and the content can be delivered much faster. And with a publication as relevant as the New York Times, you can assume that the content will be accessed all over the world - and people shouldn't have to wait long.

Optimize images

The majority of images that PageSpeed Insights suggests for optimization would only be a few kilobytes smaller as a result of compression, in some cases even just bytes. Of course, compressing images is an important factor for performance optimization. However, with such small savings, it is doubtful that this will significantly improve your loading time.

Reduce JavaScript

A total of almost 72 kilobytes could be saved here. Whether this makes a fundamental difference for a website as huge as the New York Times remains to be seen.

Reduce HTML

As with the images and JavaScript files, the proposed savings potential is minimal and therefore unconvincing.

Some of the measures suggested by the tool are probably simply uneconomical, and others would only bring about such marginal changes that they are not worth using. The sobering conclusion: PageSpeed Insights throws up all kinds of suggestions for improvement. However, not all of them lead to a significant improvement in the performance of the NY Times. Otherwise, we could assume that they would already have been implemented - after all, performance has a direct impact on the success of the business model.

PageSpeed Insights Score remains a customer topic

In professional circles, the complete discrepancy between PageSpeed Score and loading speed has led to a heated debate. After all, the tool is also available to laypeople who are not necessarily aware of this discrepancy. Contributions from respected online marketing gurus such as this one, in which it is said that a PageSpeed Score of 100 equates to a fast loading time, cause additional confusion.

Time and again, people are unsettled by the observation that everything is red and orange in PageSpeed Insights and therefore order the implementation of all suggested measures. In the end, the tool often leads to time being wasted in two ways: during optimization, when nonsensical suggestions are implemented, and during communication, when it has to be explained to customers why they are nonsensical.

The PageSpeed Insights score may improve if you reduce image sizes and HTML by a few KB. However, performance benefits above all from measures that the PageSpeed Insights tool does not even suggest. Professional performance optimization is ultimately more than just focusing on a single key figure. This is also shown by the relaunch of the Financial Times: a comprehensive redesign of the website is usually necessary for major optimization efforts.

The focus here is primarily on high traffic areas. Smaller websites should, of course, first ensure that they adhere to basic "best practices". However, above a certain threshold, massive changes need to be made to the websites in order to increase performance at all, such as switching to a good host or a fundamental overhaul of the site architecture. This should be clear to you.

Arguments for real performance optimization

The uncertainty about the PageSpeed Insights Score offers a good opportunity for design agencies in particular: because if you recognize the connection between loading speed and business and know how to use it, you will stand out from the competition. Concrete figures and case studies, such as the example of the NY Times, will help you to convince them:

• In 2006, Amazon carried out A/B tests which showed that a 100 millisecond delay in loading speed meant around 1 percent loss of sales per year - or in other words: 1.6 billion dollars.
• Studies show that the average attention span of users has decreased from 12 to 8 seconds in recent years. So once a website loads for five seconds, there are only three seconds left to convince the user of the content.(The validity of this data is debated, but you are on the safe side if you assume that users will spend less time on your content rather than more).
• Loading speed is highly relevant for business, especially for mobile websites. In e-commerce, the loading time has a fundamental impact on sales: if the website is too slow, more than half prefer to spend their money elsewhere. 53 percent of users abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load on a cell phone. And for every second that a mobile website takes longer to load, you lose 20 percent in conversions. And mobile traffic should not be neglected: The average time spent on the internet via mobile devices is already around 87 minutes, and the smartphone has overtaken the laptop as the most common internet device.

How to get your customers to ignore the PageSpeed Insights Score

So how do you help your customers to correctly categorize the Google PageSpeed Insights rating and attach less importance to the tool? Here is a summary of the most important arguments:

• The PageSpeed Score has nothing to do with the loading speed, but assesses whether certain measures have been implemented that are generally recommended. Not all of these measures make sense. You can offer to check them in detail and implement those that you consider useful.
• The PageSpeed Score is not relevant for SEO. The Time to First Byte (TTFB) is included in the ranking, not the complete loading time. You can determine this value with the Webpagetest tool, for example. We explain how to correctly analyze the real page load time with Webpagetest in our e-book.
• The PageSpeed Insights tool only checks "publicly" accessible factors. For example, the tool cannot see how the database is doing (and that's a good thing for security reasons). With a tidy database, a lean theme that does not send too many HTTP requests to the server and as few plugins as possible, your loading time will increase considerably. However, these factors are not taken into account by PageSpeed Insights. As a result, WordPress websites that actually perform well still receive poor scores.
• PageSpeed Insights does not include all performance optimization measures. Above all, draw attention to the importance of a good host that works with HTTP/2 and the latest PHP version. If the hosting is no good, no matter how much you optimize the website, the loading time will not change fundamentally.

Focusing only on the PageSpeed score is like taking a horse to a Formula 1 race. Even if you dye your horse's coat red and shave a Ferrari logo into its flank, you won't overtake the motorized racing cars.

Conclusion

Forbes, Time Magazine and the New York Times may not have the most visually appealing websites, but they are among the most successful WordPress websites in the world. This is because design, function and speed work together to create a coherent overall experience.

However, the PageSpeed Insights Score does not reflect this. It regularly presents agencies with the challenge of explaining to concerned customers that their website will not disappear into the depths of search results if the tool's verdict is "poor". The loading time of a website depends on a huge number of factors, many of which are not even reflected by highly simplistic tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights.

If you ultimately decide to implement the proposed measures, you should always measure the actual loading time before and after to test the effectiveness of the optimizations.

The bottom line is that the tool points out some standard measures (compress images, use SSL and/or HTTP/2, set up caching, etc.). However, a good user experience depends above all on the design of the website, load time optimization (which the PageSpeed tool does not measure) and UX optimization.

Have you ever had the experience of a poor PageSpeed score? Or do you know the concerned questions on this topic? Feel free to leave me a comment with your experiences and tips.

The new PageSpeed Insights