Google announced they have updated the Pagespeed Insights tool to now show real user data from Chrome users, on how they access your pages. That means, if you are using Chrome and accessing this page, Google may use that data to determine how fast or slow this page is.
Google wrote the "PageSpeed Insights will use data from the Chrome User Experience Report to make better recommendations for developers and the optimization score has been tuned to be more aligned with the real-world data."
In fact, Google shows two metrics, First Contentful Paint (FCP) and DOM Content Loaded (DCL). Google will rate your page Fast, Average, or Slow based on both metrics. So if both metrics are in the top one-third of their category, the page is considered fast.
Here is the chart:
- Fast: The median value of the metric is in the fastest third of all page loads.
- Slow: The median value of the metric is in the slowest third of all page loads.
- Average: The median value of the metric is in the middle third of all page loads.
I ran the test on this site and it is pretty fast, to my surprise:
My company site doesn't even have the metric, which means that it doesn't have enough data in the Chrome user experience report:
Here is Search Engine Land's report:
Google said the PSI report now has several different elements:
- The Speed score categorizes a page as being Fast, Average, or Slow. This is determined by looking at the median value of two metrics: First Contentful Paint (FCP) and DOM Content Loaded (DCL). If both metrics are in the top one-third of their category, the page is considered fast.
- The Optimization score categorizes a page as being Good, Medium, or Low by estimating its performance headroom. The calculation assumes that a developer wants to keep the same appearance and functionality of the page.
- The Page Load Distributions section presents how this page’s FCP and DCL events are distributed in the data set. These events are categorized as Fast (top third), Average (middle third), and Slow (bottom third) by comparing to all events in the Chrome User Experience Report.
- The Page Stats section describes the round trips required to load the page’s render-blocking resources, the total bytes used by the page, and how it compares to the median number of round trips and bytes used in the dataset. It can indicate if the page might be faster if the developer modifies the appearance and functionality of the page.
- Optimization Suggestions is a list of best practices that could be applied to this page. If the page is fast, these suggestions are hidden by default, as the page is already in the top third of all pages in the data set.
Page Speed Insights now uses real-world data in its reports - check it out, if you care about speed (and of course you should :-))!https://t.co/8BN99PT4z7 pic.twitter.com/VK4B7VDpCS
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) January 10, 2018
I should add that although page speed is super important for your web site, the impact it plays in ranking is minimal despite what rumors are out there.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
