Everything that is wrong with measuring page load speed and how to do it right | Ep. 9

Hello and welcome to another episode of Growth Detectives show. I am your host Chris Planeta and in this episode we are going to talk about everything that is wrong with measuring page speed. Before we do that, however, let's think about one very important thing. How much does it really matter? How much does page speed, page load speed actually matter? Now, when you look this phrase up in Google, you might get different results saying that, for example, one second delay in page speed may result in 10-20 percent bigger bounce rate. However, none of these websites mention one super important thing - motivation.  Motivation of people that come to the website, who want to get some content, who want to buy a product, who want to do something on that website. And now, depending on how motivated they are, one second delay in page load speed may not have such great impact. The second thing that matters is the perception of speed. Because there are techniques to make your website seem much faster than it actually is and so people will have much better experience because of that. Now, let's think about the incorrect ways of measuring page speed.  So the first one, is looking at one-time snapshots of your website page speed.  Most of online tools that measure page speed give you such one-time snapshots. So, you are only getting the page load speed for one specific page at a particular time, from one particular device, with one particular screen resolution. Which is a problem. Why? Because you are not seeing the page speed results of all the other cases, of people in different countries using different devices, having different connection speeds to the Internet. I'm not saying, however, that it's totally useless. It is useful, but not to measure page load speed. What is it useful for? I will tell you about it later, but now let's concentrate on another incorrect way to measure page speed and this is measuring the speed from your own browser. This is, for example, the way Google Lighthouse does it. It measures how fast the page loads on your browser. So in this case, you are getting all the disadvantages of the snapshots I told you earlier, plus an additional disadvantage that your results are skewed by the speed of your internet connection - which of course may vary depending on the time of the day, depending on other users that may use the same connection. So, what is the right way of measuring page speed?  First, you need to have a lot of data and not only from one page, but all the pages on your website. The best way to do it, is to use your web analytics tool that measures your traffic and page load speed. Unfortunately, the most popular tool - Google Analytics - has no page load speed measuring feature in the latest version. Now, you need to create your own custom script, that measures all the page speed data and then send it to Google Analytics.  However, if you don't want to do it, if you prefer to have something that works out of the box, then I would suggest you take a look at Matomo.  Matomo is an open source alternative to Google Analytics and it gives you all the page performance numbers. So Matomo is the way to go here.  And now how to look at those numbers. Well, first you need to have at least a few hundred visits. The more, the better.  Then, when you get the data, you should segment the traffic and see how much it takes for mobile phones to load your website, how much it takes for other devices to load your website. You might even want to check how long it takes to load a site from different countries. Because if you have your website hosted on a single server in one country, then it may take significantly longer for the website to load if somebody comes from a totally different continent.  In such situations, you might want to to have a CDN set up to have your website available on different servers situated in different places in the world. Now, when you have the data and you see that there is something wrong with the page speed, if you see that there are some anomalies like pages that load significantly longer than other ones, then you should take a look if there are people whose page load speed took much longer than other users. If you still see that the numbers are greater than the average then you should take a look at the web page itself. Here is actually the only case when you should be looking at online page speed tools, because they will actually give you information what are the elements on your website that impact your page speed the most. However, it also comes with a catch - because these tools are still not perfect. And from my own experience, I noticed that if your website has a lot of content that is loaded dynamically, like some images in a slider, for example, or products, then the measured speed of page load can be greater than it actually is. So if you want to see the real numbers, you should either remove dynamically generated elements or change their settings so that the content wouldn't be generated dynamically. And only after you do all these things, you will get the right idea what's going on on your website, how long does it take to load for different visitors, for different devices and locations and what to do with pages that take significantly longer to load. And that would be all for this episode.  The next one will be published tomorrow or on Monday. And also I'll soon be launching a YouTube channel for Growth Detectives, where you can see the things that I talk about. Okie dokes, so that's it. See you soon.