Google is determined to make the web better. PageSpeed Insights, which I mentioned last year, is a great tool for owners to quickly determine how their websites fare, in terms of mobile speed, desktop speed, and usability on mobile devices. It’s still roughly the same thing, but Google has moved that to testmysite.withgoogle.com.
The new test tool isn’t actually completely new. It’s somewhat based on PageSpeed Insights, which itself has evolved into the new Mobile Friendly Test tool. It’s also been around for a couple of months already.
What’s new is how the scores are presented. The new tool also focuses more on useful and relevant tips that you can action. I recall, and it still is happening now, that the original PageSpeed Insights used to suggested some fixes that were out of my control, and ironically, were those for Google themselves to fix.
The new interface makes it far simpler. It’s all green.
That’s right. All 99 — for mobile friendliness, mobile speed, and desktop speed. There’s not quite anything that needs fixing here on my blog, at least for the moment. I’m not sure if 100 is actually a possible score, but Google hasn’t got any suggestions about what needs improvement. These are important metrics. According to Google:
- Users are five times more likely to leave a website if it is not mobile-friendly. I suppose, presumably, this is for users accessing from a mobile device.
- Nearly half of all visitors will leave a mobile site if the pages don’t load within 3 seconds.
- 90% of users say they use multiple screens for various tasks on their desktop.
The test looks at various components of your website, including HTML, CSS, scripts and images. It determines how well your website loads, and how fast, on both mobile and desktop platforms. There’s a lot of emphasis on mobile these days. A study in 2014 found that users spend 177 minutes on their phones per day. Mobile sessions average a mere 1 minute 10 seconds long, many dozens of times a day. It’s important to recognise and design for mobile.
How does your site fare today?