Now You Can See How Slow Google Thinks Your Pages Are

Google is finally bringing page speed into the mainstream Google interface. So far, we only had Google’s fuzzy statement that page speed is a factor in your Google search rankings. This has been the case for years. To support this, they’ve created lots of tools like PageSpeed insights, and even the Chrome developer tools has sections for performing page speed audits. Last week, Google finally brought page speed reports to the search console – marking the official assimilation of this parameter into their reports.

An Extension of Lighthouse

In an earlier article about web pages standards, I’d talked about accessibility, and how these are highlighted in Google’s “Lighthouse” reports. This report is an extremely detailed breakdown of your page speed factors, including Javascript and CSS loading, web fonts, metrics such as Time to First Byte and FCP.

However, Lighthouse reports directly tested your site at a given time and came up with recommendations. They didn’t necessarily reflect real-world use interactions, which is of course, the end goal for any page speed improvement project.

How is the Search Console Report Different?

The Google search console report on page speed can be found on the left-hand sidebar as shown here:

You can see that it’s still marked as “experimental”, which means it’s going to develop quite a bit from now into its final form.

However, one thing stood out for me while going through its features. The speed of the site is measured in something called “FCP”, which stands for “First Contentful Paint”. It refers to the time taken for a user to actually see something – anything – on the browser after they click or type a URL in the address bar.

Here’s the quote for how FCP is calculated:

Aggregate FCP is the time it takes for 75% of the visits to a URL in this group to reach FCP.

This is an important development, because it means that Google is now measuring the actual times experienced by users, instead of handpicked tests on PageSpeed tools, and even Lighthouse. This has important consequences if your audience is geographically distributed.

Page Speed Now Depends on Where your Users Are

The obvious consequence of this is that your page speed score is now massively impacted by where your customers live (as it should). It doesn’t matter how much you optimize your site, and what clever tricks you use to improve your Javascript rendering, or whatever. If your customers live in a far off place like Egypt, then the times they experience are going to reflect your score.

It means that even if you see fast speeds sitting in the US, your customers might experience something completely different. You have to optimize for them, and not for yourself.

The “Fast” Limit is Incredibly Tight

In the page report, you can see that most of my URLs are marked as “moderate” with average FCPs of around 2.1:

Personally, I think 2.1 is pretty damn good, considering that most of my visits come from overseas in locations that are pretty far-flung. But according to Google, it’s still “moderate”. To get into the “fast” category, you need to bring that down to 1 second or less.

This is a super tight window. I’m not sure it’s at all possible for even a moderately complex site with just basic Javascript loading to bring its FCP down to under 1 second. I suppose it’s definitely possible, but in a way that would involve potentially breaking your site. I’m not convinced I need to go to such extreme lengths just to reduce my FCP from 2 seconds to 1 second.

I may have to eat my words later on, and if necessary, I will. But for now, I think 2 seconds and “moderate” page speed scores in the Google Search Console reports are just fine!