Search Console's New Speed Report

A new report, marked experimental

Search Console added a Speed report yesterday. It carries an experimental label, which means its groupings and details may change.

It sorts your pages into three groups, fast, moderate and slow, with separate charts for mobile and desktop.

The figures do not come from a test Google runs. They come from real visits by people using Chrome, on their own phones and computers, over their own connections.

That makes it a view of how quickly your site loads for the people who actually use it, which no test on the office computer can give.

What the report shows

• Two charts, one for mobile and one for desktop.
• Three groups, fast, moderate and slow, counted in pages.
• Issues, such as first content appearing too late on mobile.
• Example addresses for each issue, standing in for similar pages.
• Nothing at all for pages with too few visits to measure.

The last is what many small business sites will see first. The report only covers pages with enough visits from Chrome users who have opted in to sharing usage statistics.

A site with modest traffic may show a handful of pages, or none at all, which says nothing bad about the site.

The two measures, in plain terms

First Contentful Paint is the time from following a link to the first text or image appearing. Until then, the visitor is looking at a blank screen, wondering whether anything is happening.

First Input Delay is the wait between a visitor's first tap or click, on a menu or a button, and the page starting to respond. A long delay usually means the phone is still busy running the page's scripts.

A page takes the worse of its two ratings. One whose text appears quickly but ignores the first tap for too long still counts as slow.

Real visitors, not a test

PageSpeed Insights loads a page under set conditions and reports what happened. That is useful for finding causes, but it is one simulated visit.

The Speed report reflects many real ones. The mid-range Android phone on a rural connection counts, and so does the office desktop.

When the two disagree, the field data is closer to what customers experience, and the lab test is better at explaining why.

One gap is worth knowing. The data comes from Chrome on Android and on computers, so iPhone visitors, who browse through Safari's engine whichever app they use, are not in it.

Reading it without alarm

Start with the mobile chart. Most visitors arrive on phones, Google increasingly indexes sites from their mobile version, and phones are where slow pages hurt most.

Moderate is not failing. A site that is mostly moderate on mobile has room to improve deliberately rather than urgently.

Slow deserves a closer look, but not page by page. Open each issue and read the example addresses together, asking what kind of pages they are.

Pages that are slow together

Pages built from the same template usually share the same problem. When the slow examples are all blog posts, or all product pages, or all location pages, the cause is in what that template loads.

That is good news. Fixing a template once fixes every page built on it.

Run one or two examples through PageSpeed Insights. Its suggestions, read alongside what the template contains, usually point at the culprit: an embedded map, a video player, an oversized image, or a script from another company's server.

A worked example

A residential real estate brokerage with about twenty agents opened the new report this week, expecting a verdict on the whole site.

Desktop pages were mostly fast. On mobile, a few dozen pages were slow, and every example fell into one of two groups: the featured listing pages and the neighbourhood guides.

Each listing page loaded an interactive map and a mortgage calculator at the top. Each guide loaded a video player for a short drive-through tour before anybody scrolled near it.

Both meant a phone downloading and running a great deal of script from other companies' servers before it could show the page or respond to a tap.

The fix replaces each live map with a plain image that opens the full map when tapped, loads the calculator only when somebody asks for it, and shows a still frame until somebody taps a video.

The report will take weeks to reflect the change, so the brokerage is checking each template in PageSpeed Insights in the meantime.

Which pages to fix first

Start where slow pages and business value overlap: slow mobile pages that lead to a call, a booking or a sale.

Then the templates behind the largest groups of slow pages, since one fix covers many. Pages nobody visits can wait, and they will not have enough data to appear anyway.

Leave moderate desktop pages until last. They are rarely where customers give up.

Speed and search rankings

Since July last year, speed has been one of the signals Google uses to rank mobile results, and Google said at the time that only the slowest pages would be affected.

For most small businesses, the stronger reason to fix a slow page is the person waiting on it, who has another business one tap away.

Nothing in the report says a page is being held back in search results, and it should not be read that way.

The counter-case

A small site with no data in the report has not failed anything. It has too few Chrome visitors to measure, and PageSpeed Insights and a real phone are the better tools for it.

The report is experimental, and its groupings may change. Treat it as a guide to where to look, not a score to chase.

And a site with bigger gaps, such as a missing phone number or out-of-date prices, should fix those first. But where the report lists slow mobile pages, find the template they share and fix it there.

This week

1. Open the Speed report in Search Console.
2. Start with the mobile chart.
3. Note which kinds of pages are slow.
4. Run one example through PageSpeed Insights.
5. Fix the shared template, not single pages.
6. Test on a real phone afterwards.
7. Check the report again in a month.

Step three is what makes the report useful. A list of slow addresses is a chore; noticing that they are all one kind of page turns it into a single job.

One of the commonest causes of a slow template is covered in plugins that load on every page.

Frequently asked questions

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