Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How important is Lighthouse page speed measurement?
-
Hi,
Many experts cite the Lighthouse speed as an important factor for search ranking. It's confusing because several top sites have Lighthouse speed of 30-40, yet they rank well. Also, some sites that load quickly have a low Lighthouse speed score (when I test on mobile/desktop they load much quicker than stated by Lighthouse).
When we look at other image rich sites (such as Airbnb, John Deere etc) the Lighthouse score can be 30-40.
Our site https://www.equipmentradar.com/ loads quickly on Desktop and Mobile, but the Lighthouse score is similar to Airbnb and so forth. We have many photos similar to photo below, probably 30-40, many of which load async.
Should we spend more time optimizing Lighthouse or is it ok? Are large images fine to load async?
Thank you,
Dave
-
It's absolutely essential that your company website is fast.
Don't purchase slow, cheap web hosting, regardless of your business type.
Instead purchase super fast hosting for your business.
Sometimes, it's much more expensive, but it's well worth it as it can help improve your organic SEO.
We purchased lightning-fast hosting; this is the one reason why we are now selling more bath garden offices than ever before before.
-
it is important to distinguish between PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse. Maybe it's more important to follow PageSpeed Insights for your website. It becomes rather clear after reading this article https://rush-analytics.com/blog/google-pagespeed-insights-vs-lighthouse-how-do-they-differ. The differences between PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse are explained in an easy way.
-
My understanding is that "Page Experience" signals (including the new "core web vitals) will be combined with existing signals like mobile friendliness and https-security in May, 2021. This is according to announcements by Google.
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/11/timing-for-page-experience
So, these will be search signlas, but there are lots of other very important search signals which can outweigh these. Even if a page on John Deere doesn't pass the Core Web Vitals criteria, it is still likely to rank highly for "garden tractors".
If you are looking at Lighthouse, I would point out a few things:
- The Lighthouse audits on your own local machine are going to differ from those run on hosted servers like Page Speed Insights. And those will differ from "field data" from the Chrome UX Report
- In the end, it's the "field data" that will be used for the Page Experience validation, according to Google. But, lab-based tools are very helpful to get immediate feedback, rather than waiting 28 days or more for field data.
- If your concern is solely about the impact on search rankings, then it makes sense to pay attention specifically to the 3 scores being considered as part of CWV (CLS, FID, LCP)
- But also realize that while you are improving scores for criteria which will be validated for search signals, you're also likely improving the user experience. Taking CLS as an example, for sure users are frustrated when they attempt to click a button and end up clicking something else instead because of a layout shift. And frustrated users generally equals lower conversion rates. So, by focusing on improvements in measures like these (I do realize your question about large images doesn't necessarily pertain specifically to CLS), you are optimizing both for search ranking and for conversions.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google analytics suddenly stopped tracking all my landing pages
Hey guys. I love the new update of GA. Looks so clean. So, of course, I was excited to see how my landing pages were doing. I went to behavior, all content, all pages. And I noticed it's only showing me 19 pages out of the 93 I have indexed. And none of the top ones at all! Can't find them anywhere in GA! Anyone seen this before? Thank you so much
Reporting & Analytics | | Meier0 -
Help Blocking Crawlers. Huge Spike in "Direct Visits" with 96% Bounce Rate & Low Pages/Visit.
Hello, I'm hoping one of you search geniuses can help me. We have a successful client who started seeing a HUGE spike in direct visits as reported by Google Analytics. This traffic now represents approximately 70% of all website traffic. These "direct visits" have a bounce rate of 96%+ and only 1-2 pages/visit. This is skewing our analytics in a big way and rendering them pretty much useless. I suspect this is some sort of crawler activity but we have no access to the server log files to verify this or identify the culprit. The client's site is on a GoDaddy Managed WordPress hosting account. The way I see it, there are a couple of possibilities.
Reporting & Analytics | | EricFish
1.) Our client's competitors are scraping the site on a regular basis to stay on top of site modifications, keyword emphasis, etc. It seems like whenever we make meaningful changes to the site, one of their competitors does a knock-off a few days later. Hmmm. 2.) Our client's competitors have this crawler hitting the site thousands of times a day to raise bounce rates and decrease the average time on site, which could like have an negative impact on SEO. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe Google is going to reward sites with 90% bounce rates, 1-2 pages/visit and an 18 second average time on site. The bottom line is that we need to identify these bogus "direct visits" and find a way to block them. I've seen several WordPress plugins that claim to help with this but I certainly don't want to block valid crawlers, especially Google, from accessing the site. If someone out there could please weigh in on this and help us resolve the issue, I'd really appreciate it. Heck, I'll even name my third-born after you. Thanks for your help. Eric0 -
Google Analytics Goal/Event/SOMETHING to show only Wordpress "Posts", not pages, etc
Hi all, Our site is build on Wordpress and formerly the post URL's had the typical date format at the beginning. This made it easy for me to look at, for example, all search traffic to the blog. I would just view URL's containing /2014/ and /2015/ and boom. We have since removed the dates from the URL's with proper redirects etc, which is great, but now I can't figure out a way to look at ONLY the blog in GA. I like to track a KPI of 'search visits to blog posts' and I can't figure out how to now. Can I set up a GA event that only fires when the post type template for blog posts loads? Some other solution? I'm lost here, and there's gotta be a good way to do it...
Reporting & Analytics | | 3DR0 -
Find Pages with 0 traffic
Hi, We are trying to consolidate the amount of landing pages on our site, is there any way to find landing pages with a particular URL substring which have had 0 traffic? The minimum which appears in google analytics is 1 visit.
Reporting & Analytics | | driveawayholidays0 -
How to safely exclude search result pages from Google's index?
Hello everyone,
Reporting & Analytics | | llamb
I'm wondering what's the best way to prevent/block search result pages from being indexed by Google. The way search works on my site is that search form generates URLs like:
/index.php?blah-blah-search-results-blah I wanted to block everything of that sort, but how do I do it without blocking /index.php ? Thanks in advance and have a great day everyone!0 -
Google Analytics - Next Page Path is the Same URL?
Hey Everyone, I have a Google analytics question. I'm looking through a client's site and when I look at the next page path, I get the same URL as the next path. For example, on the homepage, the next page path I get is the homepage again? This happens for all URL's, is this an implementation error? Is there a way to fix this? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | EvansHunt0 -
Does traffic coming from Adwords increase overall Domain Authority or Page Rank?
If I'm setting up an Adwords campaign, will setting my homepage as the landing page boost my domain rank? and will the Page Rank of the landing page get boosted because of the high click rate coming from the Adwords campaign?
Reporting & Analytics | | s2bkevin0 -
Time on page: What happens when I open many tabs?
Hello everyone, I was studying Analytics, and checked that the time on page is calculated by the diference of the time you entered the page and when you click to go to another one. But how the time is calculated when I open several links using new tabs in different moments? Does Google counts the last tab? Just a guess... Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | seomasterbrasil0