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> In July, the SEO ranking algorithm was updated to include page speed as a ranking factor for both mobile pages and ads. What's one supposed to do when PageSp

> In July, the SEO ranking algorithm was updated to include page speed as a ranking factor for both mobile pages and ads. What's one supposed to do when PageSpeed only points to Google's own asset delivery services as being "the" big problems which cause a lower score? - "serve images in next gen formats" - complains about images served from tpc.googlesyndication.com - "efficiently encode images" - same as above - "reduce javascript execution time" - cdn.ampproject.org; securepubads.g.doubleclick.net; www.googletagservices.com .. ? I can easily get rid of those issues, "simply" by not showing any ads. The site will then be really fast, and... I'll get the ability to display ads again?! Shame the ad-related revenue will be 0, which isn't unfortunately a good thing for the site. Why is Google themselves not doing things "right" in order to ensure a speedy execution? A while back, one of the reasons for a low score was that the GPT.js code (required to show ads) had a short expiration time. Dammit. How am I supposed to fix that, Google?

benschwarz 7y ago
Hi! Author of the post here. Lighthouse definitely has some improvements to make for the audit suggestions that offer advice to improve the score. I think people get a little bit frustrated/blinded by the advice when there's nothing that can be done about third parties (I know I do!). Our product Calibre (mentioned in the bottom of the post) has a n adblocking/third party blocking feature that allows you to compare your pages with or without third party scripts gunking up performance metrics (here's the release post: https://calibreapp.com/blog/release-notes-apr-2019/ https://calibreapp.com/blog/release-notes-apr-2019/). We've seen really good success in separating the two because it sends a clear signal of what a site WOULD score without ads. This is good because it makes it clear to PMs, management and decision makers that tracking tools incur a really visible cost.
- benschwarz 7y ago
  … but to answer your question better. It sucks that Google's own services don't live up to the performance expectations of tools made in other parts of Google.
  - mikece 7y ago
    I imagine the various teams at Google see each other as competition more than we might realize. How many chat-like applications are there? How about the Java/Kotlin Android teams versus the Flutter team? All of the GPL die-hards looking at the non-GPL (MIT, BSD, and Apache2) Fuchsia project wondering just how committed Google is to the Linux kernel.
    - liveoneggs 7y ago
      if google could gain a market advantage similar to the one they got from linux (for free) they would do so immediately no matter the "cost" to linux/OSS/the-world-at-large
    - skybrian 7y ago
      Yes, different teams have different priorities, but there isn't direct competition between a performance-measuring tool and ad-serving. In this case it's probably more the performance team wanting to do unbiased measurement. As they should.
- cmroanirgo 7y ago
  You realise that calibre is also the name of a very well known ebook management app that's been around forever? I thought this was a post from them, initially. I'd imagine your website would get a lot of bounces due to this. https://calibre-ebook.com/ https://calibre-ebook.com/
- bradknowles 7y ago
  So, I'm curious. How does https://calibreapp.com/ https://calibreapp.com/ compare to https://www.webpagetest.org/ https://www.webpagetest.org/ and https://www.sitespeed.io/ https://www.sitespeed.io/ and https://gtmetrix.com/ https://gtmetrix.com/ ? Why would someone want to pay you for your service, as opposed to using any of the above? Do you support browsers other than Chrome? Do you support a wide variety of simulated hardware? Do you support a wide variety of testing locations? Do you support any page speed test profile other than Lighthouse and Google Page Speed? Do you support running your software in a Docker container of my own choice? Because I can get all those things via one or more of the competitors in this space, and I'm not seeing any compelling reason to even look at Calibre. Please feel free to convince me that I'm wrong.
  - youngtaff 7y ago
    Depends on your use case - I recommend Calibre to some clients, SpeedCurve to others and self hosted WebPageTest or Sitespeed.io to others. One of the key deciding factors is do you want to run the service yourself e.g. VMs, containers, in multiple regions or do you want to make that someone else's problem and get on with running your business - most of my clients are in the later camp Both Calibre and SpeedCurve have clean UI's that allow performance to be tracked over time, from multiple locations and integration with other services via web hooks, APIs etc. GTMetrix is old and outdated IMV, - it still heavily relies on YSlow rules which are well past their sell-by-date WebPageTest is my favourite (SpeedCurve uses it under the hood) but it's got no ability to track over time, SiteSpee.io is really nice too but is self-hosted. With the exception of some real devices in Dulles, all of the products rely on emulation for mobile, and Safari is a real gap for them all too
Nextgrid 7y ago
Find a real business model instead of serving cancer & malware to your visitors?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jedberg 7y ago
Well I think the good news is that all of your competitors have to suffer the same problems, so you'll all be punished equally.
moron4hire 7y ago
I get an excellent PageSpeed score by hosting my own stuff on Azure. CDNs make sense only for sites with huge traffic. And at that point, maybe you could afford to pay for extra bandwidth and still not use a CDN. And I've mostly stopped using PageSpeed at all, because the metrics are obvious: total download size matters. All the arguments for "but your user might already have such-and-such-version-of-jQuery cached" just have not had a good enough impact on total experience. There are so many versions of whatever you might be importing, and HTTP keep-alive works really, really well. Of course, I also don't have any tracking setup, say nothing of the 50 dozen systems most sites use. I've never gotten anything out of them that I couldn't have figured out on my own. They always come back to "users bounce when shit is slow". Thanks, tracking scripts, for contributing to my bounce-rate. So there you go, do you want to create a good user experience, or do you want to sell your users out for a pittance? Have your first user experience in your site be super optimized. Static HTML. Host all assets on your own. Size images correctly. Minimize, then inline the CSS and JS. There are plenty of design-time scripts to automate it. And if you're making SPAs, you can implement all the dynamic loading you want past the initial page because users clicking to open your app are already engaged. But get that first page on-screen in less than a second on a 2G network.
dylan604 7y ago
The left hand does not always know what the right hand is doing in large corps. I'm assuming the SEO team is not in daily contact with the ad delivery team(s). The SEO team is just reporting on what they how they are seeing the page load without concern for where the slowdowns occur. It is quite funny/sad/ironic that it is within the same letters of the Alphabet that are the problem. I had the same experience with Apple when the iTunes team were invalidating ProRes files created from Final Cut Pro.
- JoshTriplett 7y ago
  > The left hand does not always know what the right hand is doing in large corps. On the other hand, it's a good thing to not give a free pass for bad behavior in products you produce.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- shaki-dora 7y ago
  I wish people would remember this phenomenon when they are engaging in wild theories of intricate (and often malevolent) corporate strategy. Such as: buying GitHub is unlikely to be Microsoft's attempt to trap OSS; Apple's early adoption of new ports probably isn't motivated by selling an extra $12 dongle for every $2000 Macbook; a journalist criticising Facebook is rather unlikely to be acting on corporate orders to sully the competition, etc.
reaperducer 7y ago
"serve images in next gen formats" - complains about images served from tpc.googlesyndication.com I knew PageSpeed was bunk when that recommendation came up on a web page I was working with. All of the "next gen" formats that PageSpeed recommended weren't supported by any mainline browsers — not even Chrome. That may have changed by now, but my opinion of PageSpeed hasn't.

benschwarz 7y ago

Hi! Author of the post here. Lighthouse definitely has some improvements to make for the audit suggestions that offer advice to improve the score. I think people get a little bit frustrated/blinded by the advice when there's nothing that can be done about third parties (I know I do!). Our product Calibre (mentioned in the bottom of the post) has a n adblocking/third party blocking feature that allows you to compare your pages with or without third party scripts gunking up performance metrics (here's the release post: https://calibreapp.com/blog/release-notes-apr-2019/ https://calibreapp.com/blog/release-notes-apr-2019/). We've seen really good success in separating the two because it sends a clear signal of what a site WOULD score without ads. This is good because it makes it clear to PMs, management and decision makers that tracking tools incur a really visible cost.

benschwarz 7y ago
… but to answer your question better. It sucks that Google's own services don't live up to the performance expectations of tools made in other parts of Google.
- mikece 7y ago
  I imagine the various teams at Google see each other as competition more than we might realize. How many chat-like applications are there? How about the Java/Kotlin Android teams versus the Flutter team? All of the GPL die-hards looking at the non-GPL (MIT, BSD, and Apache2) Fuchsia project wondering just how committed Google is to the Linux kernel.
  - liveoneggs 7y ago
    if google could gain a market advantage similar to the one they got from linux (for free) they would do so immediately no matter the "cost" to linux/OSS/the-world-at-large
  - skybrian 7y ago
    Yes, different teams have different priorities, but there isn't direct competition between a performance-measuring tool and ad-serving. In this case it's probably more the performance team wanting to do unbiased measurement. As they should.
cmroanirgo 7y ago
You realise that calibre is also the name of a very well known ebook management app that's been around forever? I thought this was a post from them, initially. I'd imagine your website would get a lot of bounces due to this. https://calibre-ebook.com/ https://calibre-ebook.com/
bradknowles 7y ago
So, I'm curious. How does https://calibreapp.com/ https://calibreapp.com/ compare to https://www.webpagetest.org/ https://www.webpagetest.org/ and https://www.sitespeed.io/ https://www.sitespeed.io/ and https://gtmetrix.com/ https://gtmetrix.com/ ? Why would someone want to pay you for your service, as opposed to using any of the above? Do you support browsers other than Chrome? Do you support a wide variety of simulated hardware? Do you support a wide variety of testing locations? Do you support any page speed test profile other than Lighthouse and Google Page Speed? Do you support running your software in a Docker container of my own choice? Because I can get all those things via one or more of the competitors in this space, and I'm not seeing any compelling reason to even look at Calibre. Please feel free to convince me that I'm wrong.
- youngtaff 7y ago
  Depends on your use case - I recommend Calibre to some clients, SpeedCurve to others and self hosted WebPageTest or Sitespeed.io to others. One of the key deciding factors is do you want to run the service yourself e.g. VMs, containers, in multiple regions or do you want to make that someone else's problem and get on with running your business - most of my clients are in the later camp Both Calibre and SpeedCurve have clean UI's that allow performance to be tracked over time, from multiple locations and integration with other services via web hooks, APIs etc. GTMetrix is old and outdated IMV, - it still heavily relies on YSlow rules which are well past their sell-by-date WebPageTest is my favourite (SpeedCurve uses it under the hood) but it's got no ability to track over time, SiteSpee.io is really nice too but is self-hosted. With the exception of some real devices in Dulles, all of the products rely on emulation for mobile, and Safari is a real gap for them all too

Nextgrid 7y ago

Find a real business model instead of serving cancer & malware to your visitors?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jedberg 7y ago

Well I think the good news is that all of your competitors have to suffer the same problems, so you'll all be punished equally.

moron4hire 7y ago

I get an excellent PageSpeed score by hosting my own stuff on Azure. CDNs make sense only for sites with huge traffic. And at that point, maybe you could afford to pay for extra bandwidth and still not use a CDN. And I've mostly stopped using PageSpeed at all, because the metrics are obvious: total download size matters. All the arguments for "but your user might already have such-and-such-version-of-jQuery cached" just have not had a good enough impact on total experience. There are so many versions of whatever you might be importing, and HTTP keep-alive works really, really well. Of course, I also don't have any tracking setup, say nothing of the 50 dozen systems most sites use. I've never gotten anything out of them that I couldn't have figured out on my own. They always come back to "users bounce when shit is slow". Thanks, tracking scripts, for contributing to my bounce-rate. So there you go, do you want to create a good user experience, or do you want to sell your users out for a pittance? Have your first user experience in your site be super optimized. Static HTML. Host all assets on your own. Size images correctly. Minimize, then inline the CSS and JS. There are plenty of design-time scripts to automate it. And if you're making SPAs, you can implement all the dynamic loading you want past the initial page because users clicking to open your app are already engaged. But get that first page on-screen in less than a second on a 2G network.

dylan604 7y ago

The left hand does not always know what the right hand is doing in large corps. I'm assuming the SEO team is not in daily contact with the ad delivery team(s). The SEO team is just reporting on what they how they are seeing the page load without concern for where the slowdowns occur. It is quite funny/sad/ironic that it is within the same letters of the Alphabet that are the problem. I had the same experience with Apple when the iTunes team were invalidating ProRes files created from Final Cut Pro.

JoshTriplett 7y ago
> The left hand does not always know what the right hand is doing in large corps. On the other hand, it's a good thing to not give a free pass for bad behavior in products you produce.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
shaki-dora 7y ago
I wish people would remember this phenomenon when they are engaging in wild theories of intricate (and often malevolent) corporate strategy. Such as: buying GitHub is unlikely to be Microsoft's attempt to trap OSS; Apple's early adoption of new ports probably isn't motivated by selling an extra $12 dongle for every $2000 Macbook; a journalist criticising Facebook is rather unlikely to be acting on corporate orders to sully the competition, etc.

reaperducer 7y ago

"serve images in next gen formats" - complains about images served from tpc.googlesyndication.com I knew PageSpeed was bunk when that recommendation came up on a web page I was working with. All of the "next gen" formats that PageSpeed recommended weren't supported by any mainline browsers — not even Chrome. That may have changed by now, but my opinion of PageSpeed hasn't.