What’s Speed Index?
Speed Index is a Google Lighthouse performance metric that shows how quickly the content of a page is loaded and visible for the user.
The Speed Index indicates the loading time of a web page. It measures the entire loading process of what users see before scrolling.
In fact, Lighthouse takes a video of the loading process and calculates the difference between all the frames. Then, Lighthouse uses the Speedline Node.JS module to compute the final SI score. The Speed Index is the result of a calculation: it’s the average rendering speed of a web page and its visual progress, also called visual completion.
It’s a meaningful lab metric for measuring loading time that directly affects how users perceive a website’s performance.
Technical SEO Checklist
Search engines give preferential treatment in search results to websites that display certain technical characteristics for example a secure connection, a responsive design or a fast loading time and technical SEO is the work you need to do to ensure your website does so.
Below you’ll find a checklist of important steps you can take to ensure your technical SEO is up to scratch. By following these guidelines, you can help to ensure that the security and structure of your site meet the expectation of search engine algorithms, and is rewarded in search results accordingly.
Technical SEO Checklist
-Use SSL
-Ensure your site is mobile-friendly
–Speed your site up
-Fix duplicate content issues
-Create an XML sitemap
-Consider enabling AMP
-Add structured data markup to your website
-Register your site with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
What Speed Index measures
Speed Index measures how quickly content is visually displayed during page load. Lighthouse first captures a video of the page loading speed in the browser and computes the visual progression between frames. Lighthouse then uses the Speedline Node.js module to generate the Speed Index score.
Simply put, speed index is how many milliseconds it takes for the visible parts of a webpage to be displayed. Although that description sounds broad, developers have come up with specific formulas that attempt to measure the user’s perceived experience. It is expressed as a numeric score with a lower score being considered ideal. You’ll find that a webpage’s speed index differs on various viewport sizes.
Perception is indeed everything, but it’s extremely subjective. Fortunately, developers have gotten creative about measuring subjective experiences. The speed index isn’t a timing metric; instead, it’s a scoring system that evaluates several different speed metrics. The lower your speed index score, the faster your website is actually performing. As mentioned before, the holistic nature of the Speed Index metric means that it doesn’t tell you anything specific about any particular problem. However, it does give you an overall idea of where things stand.
How Does PageSpeed Insights Work?
The Google Pagespeed Insights tool uses Lighthouse to collect lab data and field data to provide insights into web pages. Lab data is collected in a simulated environment (like in a test server) and field data comes directly from user devices. If some of the problems and apparent barriers that hinder your site’s conversion rate appear here, then they probably exist elsewhere too.
In short, the tool shows you a performance score out of 100. In fact, the performance metrics used for calculating these scores are not weighted evenly at all. Instead, things like ‘first contentful paint’ (the first time something a user can see shows up) have a larger effect.
But you won’t see any of that. You will see a reported performance score and a colour that depends on which score bucket it falls into. It is reported as: Red (poor score): 0-49 Orange (average): 50-89 Green (good): 90-100
Is Google PageSpeed Insights Reliable & Accurate?
It’s always best not to put everything into just one basket. Get your data from multiple sources, including page load speed.
If you run multiple page speed tests, you’ll probably find some sites perform better than others each time. That’s why you need to collect data from different sources like Google Analytics etc. They must be used together with GT Metrix and Pingdom.
How to improve Speed Index?
A better speed index score indicates that a website communicates visually quickly with visitors and offers them an easier time achieving their purposes for visiting. Speed Index is not an overall web page loading time metric in Core Web Vitals; however, it may be used by some tools for specific purposes. However, the speed index is one of the most important factors indicating how quickly webpage loads for the user.
In fact, there is an important connection between Search Intent and Speed index. If a user’s Search Intent “requires a fast action”, the importance of the Speed Index will increase even more for both UX and SEO.
The speed of your website has a direct impact on SEO and conversion rates. and making mistakes can be expensive.
Users are far more likely to bounce from a slow website, and the probability of this happening increases by over 100% if a page load time goes from just 1s to 6s:
There is a real need for speed, and Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool is a fantastic resource to help you find and fix issues that could be slowing your site down.
Why Choose Us?
We’re Web Performance experts and we take pride in delivering outstanding customer experience and user experience, too. We believe in building long-term relationships with clients because happy customers mean repeat business. Our team works hard to understand your needs and implement strategies that will grow your Online Presence.
We are motivated to offer a consultation for your requirements. Let’s work together on High-Quality content.
