Pagespeed comes with challenges. Even before you started to optimize. You have to embed it, you have to allocate developer hours and you need a Real User Monitoring solution.
Using a toolset means you need someone to look at it. But not every company has a pagespeed advocate standing in between development and marketing teams. It's often either a developer, a marketer or a product owner who's also needs to look at the pagespeed from time to time.
A single number is time-saving
So, transforming all of your website's individual numbers into a single pagespeed score is a time-saving way to make decisions. But is it the best method for your business?
Don't be blindsided
Core Web Vitals is a start. It is not using a single number, unlike the single Lighthouse score.
A few UX scenario's
The following scenario's are also able to illustrate how a single score will make you unaware of remaining issues:
- LCP
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) experiences likely vary per template type. A score per page template group would be a better approach already. RUMvision helps doing this by using regular expressions to group page data, while still enabling you to zoom into individual pages. - FID & INP
First Input Delay (FID) and Interaction to Next Paint (INP) might look good to go in your aggregated Core Web Vitals data. However, if 20% of your pageviews are requested on low-end devices, they will have a more challenging time to interact with your pages. One of the reasons why Google recommends to supplement Core Web Vitals with your own RUM. - TTFB and FCP
FCP and TTFB can easily be impacted ad traffic, campaigns and traffic spikes for example. Now way to spot this with aggregated data, let alone an overall score. But it can be a minute work to spot discrepanties amongst query strings and improve caching rules accordingly.
Google Search Console and RUM
Google Search Console might help in highlighting issues, especially when issues are different per template type. Most Real User Monitoring solutions are able to help out to pinpoint issues and which conditions they are happening the most.
For example, knowing what condition is to blame will help you to determine how and where you should start fixing it. Because it could either be the user's device, the internet speed, the page, the server, response time of (blocking and/or external) files and even the weather/heat.
Pagespeed is not a single number
I do acknowledge that it's way more convenient for most stakeholders to look at a single pagespeed score to know where they are standing. They can then quickly move to the next todo on their list. That's why some website owners need the dedicated pagespeed advocates.
Stop money leaking
Pagespeed and especially UX just can't be communicated via a single number. And pagespeed advocates will know, allowing merchants from pagespeed and UX edge-cases to happen. And stop holding back further conversion growth. Or introducing regressions after deploys.
So, feel free to use our quick and free pagespeed tools. But be sure to supplement it with extended Real User Monitoring data to prevent your business from missing nuanced and stop it from leaking money.
