Hot Off The Press: Getting Google’s Glimmer Into Its Site Speed Survey System
- ArganoUV
- Commerce
If you’ve been paying attention to our sites, social media or talking to any of us — and you have been committing everything we write here to memory, right? Right? Be ready for the quiz tomorrow! — you’ll know that eCommerce is one of our three core verticals, alongside Big Data and Digital. And as one part of ecommerce, do you know what matters critically for your ecommerce site? Site speed.
We already know that you, dear reader, know how important site speed is — because it not only effects SEO (yes, Google does rewards sites that load faster!) but also conversions (yes, your potential clients are more likely to buy if the site isn’t crawling!) — which is why we always try to optimize all our clients’ sites for speed. And our own, too. Anyone too clever who is testing our site for speed right now: yup, we’re one step ahead of you, and we’re in the process of going from “fast” to “blazing fast” so check back in a week.
But there’s an interesting site-speed development that is hot off the press. Yesterday, July 2nd (2019 in case you forgot the year or are reading this far into the future: hi, future self!), Google announced how it is weighing each site for site speed. You can read their announcement here.
The key chart
| Metric | Weighing |
|---|---|
| Time to Interactive (TTI) | 5 |
| Speed Index | 4 |
| First Contentful Paint | 3 |
| First CPU Idle | 2 |
| First Meaningful Paint | 1 |
| Estimated Input Latency | 0 |
In other words: Google is usually cryptic about its ranking factors and what goes into its magic mix. But they’ve opened up a tiny glimmer of visibility here, noting which factors in speed are more or less important.
And in case you’re wondering how they could know your CPU’s Idle processes — that’s because their system is now integrated with a Chrome plugin. That’s part of the more technical side of the announcement. (And if you’re flipping out about a monopoly that measures site speed only in the browser it owns, Chrome, and not in Firefox or any other – yup, welcome to the club.)
The 3 questions
This implies three questions: what does this mean for UV? What does this mean for our clients? And what does this mean for you?
What does this mean for UV?
When we optimize a client’s site for speed, this gives us a better understanding of what factors to prioritize.
What does this mean for our clients?
We’ve got your back — we’ll make sure your ecommerce sites run fast.
What does this mean for potential clients?
You do want to work with the team that’s keeping up with the latest announcements in real-time, don’t you? No sleeping at the steering wheel at UV. Nor even sleeping in the backseat.
