Google PageSpeed Insights Page Speed And SEO

[ProCom]

So, it's very well known that Google strongly takes speed-loading into account when ranking a site (for example, see here).

I just ran my 1.5 site through their page speed insight site and got 21 <SO SAD>

I know a lot of that is due to ads on my site, etc., so I decided to come run it on the most pure XF site... here on www.XenForo.com

PageSpeed Insights

developers.google.com

The results were not encouraging.

Does this mean that best-case is an "average" rating with running Xenforo?!?!?!?

 

[eva2000]

Google PageSpeed Insights v5 was just announced with changes and additions for both field data from Chrome User Experience Report CrUX (real visitor data) + synthetic tests via Google LightHouse which tests 3G Slow 4x cpu throttle measured and Nexus 5 emulated mobile device pagespeed so it may not be real world for your visitors i.e. if you have a tech forum with all visitors using latest high end mobile phones and LTE connections

see my write up at https://community.centminmod.com/threads/google-pagespeed-insights-v5-update.16016/

As always don't look at the score it's relative. Look at the metrics and individual recommendations they are highlighting and it doesn't reflect fully on page speed. You can have one site with score of 21 still be faster than one with score of 99.

Does this mean that best-case is an "average" rating with running Xenforo?!?!?!?

But yes due to Xenforo's amount of javascript you will be harder to achieve higher score due to Lighthouse metrics being measured on slow 3G speed mobile emulated connection with artificially throttled cpu speed to 4x slower. Having Google Adsense/3rd party ads and alot of javascript will also slow you down and hence the lower scores. Unless Xenforo starts deploying javascript optimisations like tree shaking and code splitting

Recommendations
To improve your TTI score, defer or remove unnecessary JavaScript work that occurs during page load. See Optimize JavaScript Bootup and Reduce JavaScript Payloads with Tree Shaking, and Reduce JavaScript Payloads with Code Splitting.

What is tree shaking?
Tree shaking is a form of dead code elimination. The term was popularized by Rollup, but the concept of dead code elimination has existed for some time. The concept has also found purchase in webpack, which is demonstrated in this article by way of a sample app.

• Modern sites often combine all of their JavaScript into a single, large bundle. When JavaScript is served this way, loading performance suffers. Large amounts of JavaScript can also tie up the main thread, delaying interactivity. This is especially true of devices with less memory and processing power.
• An alternative to large bundles is code-splitting, which is where JavaScript is split into smaller chunks. This enables sending the minimal code required to provide value upfront, improving page-load times. The rest can be loaded on demand.

example loading this thread and look at code coverage of unused bytes per script



Whether that is your specific forum's real world user usage scenario would depend on your visitor make up reported in Google Analytics stats.

Can safely be ignored if you don't have 3G users and your mobile phone device make up is on average faster that that slow Nexus 5 emulated 4x cpu throttled speed.

 

[dinhphucv]

I and some people have discussed about pagespeed for XenForo and maybe also applied for other platforms. I reached a score of 100 for both mobile and desktop on XenForo 1.5 running on Centmin Mod server by @eva2000

First, XenForo and many other platforms are made to run on many types of hosting, server. And webmasters have to manually optimize them to match server, budget like using pagespeed, cache, CDN. => To have a higher score, you have to manually optimize by yourself, recommend using centmin mod, there're tons of tutorials on Cenmin Mod Community. Thanks to @eva2000
From what I have done and experience, I can say that pagespeed score doesn't mean everything. With me, the most importance is user experience, and SEO. To reach that 100, I can't use default google analytics option in XenForo, login with social account, like & share count (on Xen 1.5)... For me, It doesn't worth. In another fact, google doesn't meet a score of 100 and pagespeed doesn't measure the loading time of your site.
With me, a score of 70 or above is good enough.

 

[eva2000]

nice @dinhphucv using my Centmin Mod LEMP stack too ! Must of been some heavy manual optimisations to achieve that and without many 3rd party javascript related services though.

For me, It doesn't worth. In another fact, google doesn't meet a score of 100 and pagespeed doesn't measure the loading time of your site.
With me, a score of 70 or above is good enough.

Yup scores doesn't mean much if you can't use 3rd party ads and services to enrich your site and cover costs !

 

[eva2000]

Just updated my gitools script to support querying Google PageSpeed Insight v5 API and sending results to my custom Slack channel https://community.centminmod.com/posts/68604/. So I can setup a cronjob to due weekly tests of my sites

 

[ibrian]

Yeah, I'm looking at loading times now and wondering how I can improve them.

Even the main XF community site doesn't score so well: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https://xenforo.com/community/

 

[eva2000]

Don't look at actual score, look at the specific metrics

 

[kahovn]

GG Pagespeed


So, how to improve my site ?

 

[meetdilip]

Most scripts do not do well on Google rating. You can build a custom CMS and get an awesome rating. But when considering the security aspect and ecosystem, we need to compromise a bit on such indexes.