Google gives estimate on how much Site Traffic your losing due to a Slow website.

[Rick Buffkin]

This just came across my Facebook feed. You guys may know about this or you may not. I figured it would be a good discussion to talk about here on the forums.

Here's the page I got the link from!

Automotive Website Providers Are Going to Hate This - Google is Now Telling Dealers How Much Their Slow Site Is Costing Them
I’ve been talking about how slow sites and landing pages are costing dealers a lot of money for a while now, but computing an actual dollar cost has been difficult.

Until now.

And a lot of dealers and website providers are going to be pissed.

Google’s new mobile site speed testing tool tells dealers how many visitors their current website is losing because of its speed and compares its performance to competitors.

So, how much does a slow site really cost dealers? A lot! I tested a number of different sites from some very large and respected dealers. Their sites took 6 seconds to load and Google estimates that 24% of their visitors clicked away because of it.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Anyone feel like posting their stats??? Or estimated traffic loss? On a couple of my sites I'm in the upper 20% range.

 

[craigh]

On a couple of my sites I'm in the upper 20% range.

Ditto. Some are under 20%, some are well over 20%.
Competitor sites rank similarly.
Would be interested to see the science behind this though, because the Page Speed Insights from Google are pretty rough logic that I haven't been able to give significant credibility to.

 

[Jason]

A couple of things to consider here... if you click on the Info circle next to the page load time, you'll find some interesting details there. FIrst one is that the test is performed emulating loading your website via Chrome on a Moto G4 over a 3G network i.e. a mid-range phone, with a mid-range processor over an older/slower cellular network. For most of us this means that only a small percentage of your mobile visitors would be visiting your website under these conditions.

For the estimated visitors lost metric, if you click the source link at the bottom-right of the info box, you'll be taken to a page on Think With Google that explains this number is simply a prediction based on webpages loaded by a fancy-schmancy deep neural-network. This is not a measurement of the actual traffic your website lost.

Page Speed has become a hot topic the past couple months in our space, and rightfully so. You can't deny that things like load time, intrusive interstitials, and squeeze pages can negatively impact the user experience. While the tools that Google provides to measure page speed can be insightful, they often don't tell the full story of what's causing your website to have delays loading.

To that end, I like using https://tools.pingdom.com/ for testing websites. Not only does it pull in Google's PageSpeed Insights via API, but you get to see exactly what's being loaded, and how long it takes. This is extremely useful in pinpointing any third-party apps, bloated images, or other elements that are causing your website to not be as speedy as it should be.

For those of you who don't know, I do work for Dealer Inspire / Launch Digital Marketing, and we take Page Speed pretty darn seriously. If you want a behind the scenes look at what we do, check out this blog we recently published on the subject.

Hope that brought a little more context to the conversation. Cheers!

 

[Rick Buffkin]

@Jason
Thank you for your insights and the recommendation of using the tools on pingdom. I'll definitely be putting that one in my toolbox

 

[Alexander Lau]

Site speed is absolutely an organic ranking metric.
https://yoast.com/page-speed-ranking-factor

1. Activate AMP on your pages
2. Use HTTP2
3. Switch to PHP7
4. General optimizations
5. Critical rendering path

https://tools.pingdom.com
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
https://gtmetrix.com

PageSpeed Filter Examples
Here are some of the most useful PageSpeed filters. Each one has a simple HTML example attached; click "before" to see the original file, and "after" to see what PageSpeed produces with that filter (and only that filter) enabled. The two versions should look exactly the same, but the "after" one will be (slightly) speedier. Use "view source" to see the PageSpeed difference!
https://modpagespeed.com

However, good luck getting the automotive web platform provider powers that be to change this stuff for you, especially the corporate guys. I'm sure Dealer Inspire and the like are running it or have already planned for it.

 

[simpledealersuite]

I call https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/ bull-crap.
The number its generating is based on global traffic on a 3G network.
If I'm a dealer in US, targeting my local customers who (for the most part in US) use LTE why the F*** would I care about what a visitor in China or India would see on a 3G network. They are not my customers and my revenue loss is a big fat ZERO.

This is what Google said.




I opened up my site in Google Chrome
Hit F12, which brings up developer console
Go to the Network Tab
CTRL + F5 to force reloading every piece of content from server
And it took 2.18 seconds
Takes 1.8 with cached content.


SO... I CALL BULLSH*T on GOOGLES REPORT

It may be a LITTLE slower, but I dont think I'm gonna lose 32% of my customers over it.

 

[Jason@nabthat]

Can we call this what it is...Google controlling the internet

I agree with all points above, speed is important to customers and Google Speed Test is not the best way to view your sites performance for reasons that were already mentioned above (applause to all of you). Google also does not take into account single-page load applications which can load a site in milliseconds but Google will view such optimization and infrastructure negatively.

I highly recommend using the Google Chrome extension "Lighthouse" to generate a report on the true performance of your sites pages.

 

[Carluminati]

I always enjoy your TECH RIDDLED posts

 

[Carluminati]

Can we call this what it is...Google controlling the internet

I agree with all points above, speed is important to customers and Google Speed Test is not the best way to view your sites performance for reasons that were already mentioned above (applause to all of you). Google also does not take into account single-page load applications which can load a site in milliseconds but Google will view such optimization and infrastructure negatively.

I highly recommend using the Google Chrome extension "Lighthouse" to generate a report on the true performance of your sites pages.

Jason @ nabthat, you have opened my eyes. So I installed the LIGHTHOUSE extension, I am running currently a DEP website and the results I got with the Lighthouse extension are DEPLORABLE. is this real?

Scores:

27 - Progressive Web App
1 - Performance
89 - accessability
54 - best practices

 

[Carluminati]