Vital Ranking Factor in Google: Website Page Speed

Google loves fast websites, and for a long time now, its PageSpeed Insights tool has been an easy way to surface potential speed bumps in a site’s design and setup. This tool, however, always lived in a relatively obscure area of Google’s Developer site, so to give it a bit more exposure, Google has now integrated it into Google Analytics. There, Analytics users can now find a new Speed Suggestions report in the Content tab on the sidebar.

The PageSpeed Insight tool goes a step further than the Page Timings report – a tool used to identify a site’s slowest pages – by assigning web page “speed scores” based on a page’s room for improvement. According to Google Analytics, “The closer the score is to 100, the more optimized the page is for speed.”

Website owners can use the PageSpeed Insights tool to improve their site’s load time by following the tool’s recommendations: In the report, you can click through a suggestions link to see a page with all of the suggestions sorted by their impact on site speed. Example suggestions include reducing the amount of content that needs to load before your users can interact with the page, minifying JavaScript, and reducing redirects.

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