How Google Pagespeed works

Lighthouse definitely has some improvements to make for the audit suggestions that offer advice to improve the score. I think people get a little bit frustrated/blinded by the advice when there's nothing that can be done about third parties (I know I do!).

Our product Calibre (mentioned in the bottom of the post) has a n adblocking/third party blocking feature that allows you to compare your pages with or without third party scripts gunking up performance metrics (here's the release post: https://calibreapp.com/blog/release-notes-apr-2019/).

We've seen really good success in separating the two because it sends a clear signal of what a site WOULD score without ads. This is good because it makes it clear to PMs, management and decision makers that tracking tools incur a really visible cost.

All the arguments for "but your user might already have such-and-such-version-of-jQuery cached" just have not had a good enough impact on total experience. There are so many versions of whatever you might be importing, and HTTP keep-alive works really, really well.

Of course, I also don't have any tracking setup, say nothing of the 50 dozen systems most sites use. I've never gotten anything out of them that I couldn't have figured out on my own. They always come back to "users bounce when shit is slow". Thanks, tracking scripts, for contributing to my bounce-rate.

So there you go, do you want to create a good user experience, or do you want to sell your users out for a pittance?

Have your first user experience in your site be super optimized. Static HTML. Host all assets on your own. Size images correctly. Minimize, then inline the CSS and JS. There are plenty of design-time scripts to automate it. And if you're making SPAs, you can implement all the dynamic loading you want past the initial page because users clicking to open your app are already engaged. But get that first page on-screen in less than a second on a 2G network.

I had the same experience with Apple when the iTunes team were invalidating ProRes files created from Final Cut Pro.

I knew PageSpeed was bunk when that recommendation came up on a web page I was working with. All of the "next gen" formats that PageSpeed recommended weren't supported by any mainline browsers — not even Chrome.

That may have changed by now, but my opinion of PageSpeed hasn't.

I've left significant levels of details about pagespeed on the lighthouse issue tracker over the last few months. It's really frustrating to see the lighthouse team being blamed for something that isn't operationally even theirs… but that's a big company for you.

The biggest contributing factor to unstable pagespeed scores is the power of the machines that do the tests. Last time I checked the scores / bench mark scores for pagespeed were all over the place. … All the same, it's really important to understand how it all works. Hopefully the post had something for you?

How is that possible, if people know your domain name they'll type it in to their phone/tablet/watch/gamepad (or search from their shared history, or whatever). Do you reject connections that indicate they're from non-desktop devices??

I can see "we don't target mobile" but users don't often care what you're targeting and to my surprise recently I had to review mobile usage and found that it's higher in general than desktop across the board and my sites (small local websites and personal sites, mind you) followed that trend.

huh?

Mind you, also virtually no traffic and very little and lightweight content, but still...