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Google Pagespeed Test Fails Itself on Mobile

developers.google.com

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Re: Google Pagespeed Test Fails Itself on Mobile

#12

Post by latch »

wldcordeiro wrote: post #8
guelo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently motherfuckingwebsite would score 100 if they took out the google analytics tracker.

The suggestion says to cache the js file for the analytics tracker, not to remove it.

Are you being funny? If not, how do you suggest they do that?

Re: Google Pagespeed Test Fails Itself on Mobile

#14

Post by ZeroGravitas »

wldcordeiro wrote: post #8
guelo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently motherfuckingwebsite would score 100 if they took out the google analytics tracker.

The suggestion says to cache the js file for the analytics tracker, not to remove it.

It's hosted by Google, so they control the cache time.

Re: Google Pagespeed Test Fails Itself on Mobile

#15

Post by Theodores »

'Fails' is a bit harsh. Since when was it decreed that Google should make all of their web pages blazingly fast on mobile? Al Gore didn't pass any laws on that.

If Google make a developer oriented tool then it is no surprise that it works brilliantly on the desktop and slightly sub-optimally on the mobile phone. I am quite useless at web design yet I can game Pagespeed to get 95% or higher in the score. Of course the javascript will be mashed into some black hole that can't be un-minified and the way things load will not be well suited for the visitor seeing more than one page (using cached things). I can't believe someone at Google could not have done what I do to 'game' Pagespeed. The fact that they haven't is good, you should never let scores from things like Pagespeed or YSlow determine how a web page is delivered, it is like using a 'defeat device'.

I do wish they would do something to Pagespeed as they have changed what it does over the years and the latest iteration didn't excite me, I preferred the previous one, in part because you could run it against 'localhost'.

Re: Google Pagespeed Test Fails Itself on Mobile

#16

Post by callumlocke »

This doesn't surprise me. The PageSpeed Insights site has a very atypical use case.

Anyway, the PSI 'score' is only a rough guide to help point you to problems. It can be kind of useful, in that if you get something like 97-100 then you can be pretty sure it's a very fast page... but it's also probably a page that doesn't do much beyond displaying something. With a more serious web app that does more interesting things, the score becomes a less useful indicator – it's often possible to make code changes that improve perceived performance but actually reduce the PSI score.

For example, it's impossible for PSI to really know if inlining a script is going to generally improve or worsen performance, because it doesn't know your site's usage patterns, or which parts of your UI need to render first for a user to feel that the your UI 'is fast', whatever that means. UI performance is a subtler art than, say, algorithmic performance, and much less quantifiable. That's why many people prefer webpagetest.org, which comes with much smarter tools to record and analyse how the page loads, so you can actually improve UI performance.

Re: Google Pagespeed Test Fails Itself on Mobile

#17

Post by n0us »

cnn.com gets 95/100 on mobile user experience which must be a joke of some kind. My own page (the development version) gets a similar score in spite of loading much must faster. reddit.com also almost fails the desktop test.

This is a nice tool to give you suggestions about things you might want to change but it's hard to use it as a predictor of page quality.

Re: Google Pagespeed Test Fails Itself on Mobile

#18

Post by acdha »

n0us wrote: post #17

cnn.com gets 95/100 on mobile user experience which must be a joke of some kind. My own page (the development version) gets a similar score in spite of loading much must faster. reddit.com also almost fails the desktop test. This is a nice tool to give you suggestions about things you might want to change but it's hard to use it as a predictor of page quality.

cnn.com gets 95/100 because it's just an HTTP redirect to www.cnn.com, which gets 59/100 on desktop and 48 on mobile:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

https://redbot.org/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fcnn.com

Re: Google Pagespeed Test Fails Itself on Mobile

#20

Post by cbr »

The PageSpeed Insights tool gives itself [1] a high score [2]; what this link is showing is that it's giving its documentation pages [3] a low score. Not that that's much better.

[1] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

[2] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

[3] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

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