“The slower your sites load, the more visitors and revenue you’ll lose out on. Faster loading pages lead to a better overall website experience, hence Google’s move toward making it a mobile ranking factor.”
– Anna Crowe, SearchEngineJournal.com
Great hosting is very important every modern website as of November 2018 Google change the way its ranking system for measuring the speed of a website happens welcome to Google Lighthouse. This change happened literally overnight and it meant that obtaining a high score in Google PageSpeed Insights was really difficult to archive.
Sites that where previously scoring close to 100 for both mobile and desktop, where now getting 20-40 which is terrible. Potentially bring site in the Google all important search results. So all our new hosting client will benefit from our awesome Sydney based hosting.
What change and why ?
Google now has five main pillars for measuring the Speed, Performance and Usability of a website. It can be broken down as follows:
- Performance
- Progressive Web App
- Accessibility
- Best Practise
- SEO
Performance
Put simply Googles new Lighthouse website “scoring” system returns a Performance score between 0 and 100. 0 is the lowest possible score. It has to be noted as well that when running Lighthouse tests on real sites, some variability will be in the mix, scores will vary and that is to be expected. Each visit of your site it will likely slightly differently as general conditions may vary.
Essentially how fast does the site “feel” as Google simulate different operating setups when running these test. Are you leaving people waiting too long, it might surprise you that 0.5 secs is considered slow in Googles world. We have a speed, performance and security pack if you are concerned about this.
Progressive Web App
PWA or Progressive Web Apps are a new class of the classic Web App that provide native app “like” experiences when using a browser on a phone or tablet. A WordPress site with a PWA plugin setup and installed will function even when the smart device is offline.The main PWA features are
- Full responsiveness
- Wide browser compatibility
- Connectivity independence and works somewhat offline
- App-like interface by have a link to site saved as and icon
- Push notifications to alert people of things
- Self-updates meaning the PWA will always be the latest version
Accessibility
The Accessibility score google uses is a “weighted average” of all the accessibility audits. Each accessibility audit is pass or fail there is no middle ground here. But unlike PageSpeed “Performance” audits, a page does not actually get points for partially passing an accessibility audit item.
Example if some parts of your site have screen reader friendly names, but others don’t, that page gets a 0 for the “screenreader friendly names” audit which makes this area tough.
Best Practise
Google has said that site speed(and as a result your pagespeed score is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. Research has shown us that Google might specifically measuring time to first byte as when it considers page speed. If you have bad hosting the score will be terrible and unfixable.
Your only option will be to move servers because their will very little on the wordpress side of things that can fix this score typically. We would be happy to help click here