In reply to Jeff Delacruz.

Good questions, Jeff –

– No, Google is most definitely not using your PageSpeed Insights score in their ranking algorithm. Again, it’s more meant to serve as a diagnostic tool. Search “google page speed accuracy” and the top ranking articles will provide further insight.

– Pingdom and Webpagetest.org are both good tools for measuring actual page load times.

– I believe the law of diminishing returns holds true for page speed as it relates to rankings. If your site as a whole loads unusually slow, you may experience a bump in rankings by making improvements. However, I wouldn’t expect a noticeable ranking boost by going from “fast” to “fastest”.

– Resizing and compressing images based on what I outlined in point 9 is a really good best practice for all of the images on your site. Use a tool like Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) to crawl your images to find the ones that need some work. A good goal is to get all images below 150KB or so.

In reply to Zack Reboletti.

Hi Zack,

This brings up a big question. Is google’s organic algorithm considering your site speed on what it’s showing on Google Page Speed Insights or what it’s actual load time is as seen in Pingdom. It seems that Google would be more likely to consider their own page speed grader in this regard, which means despite the difference in score we have to optimize to Google’s own grader.

There’s a second level to to this as well.

In regards to images. As you know, Squarespace formats uploaded images and delivers them at different sizes based on the device’s viewport. So this means that with an iphone image Squarespace will deliver the image at 500px but the desktop will render the 1500px image. This makes sense.

When measuring page speed on websites with images, Google Page Speed Insights recommends optimization on the images and shows you the images that need optimizing. It always references images at their largest size delivered from Squarespace even with the mobile score and doesn’t take into consideration that smaller viewports deliver smaller images from Squarespace.

This leaves me with the following questions
1. How does google’s organic ranking consider page speed and should we be optimizing our websites to Google Page Speed Insights or the more generous Pingdom.

2. If the first is true, then can we ever expect to rank up with Squarespace if we use images based on how Squarespace delivers images to Google Page Speed Insights and the slower server.

Thanks!

Jeff

In reply to Jeff Delacruz.

Hey Jeff –

Thanks for sharing your experience!

Squarespace is definitely more limited than a self hosted CMS like WordPress in terms of page speed optimizations you can make. That said, the “grade” you get from Google PageSpeed Insights isn’t a great way to actually measure how fast a page loads, as it mainly just reports on a limited set of issues and best practices that (in theory) will improve performance.

For instance, I just ran your page through Pingdom’s Website Speed Test (http://tools.pingdom.com/) which actually measures load time and it reported 2.52 s on first load, which is pretty solid.

Hope that helps!

What an excellent content. Thank you! Full of learnings!

Last year around this time we moved our entire website to Squarespace and saw a huge jump in traffic and revenue. The site looked great, we were adding new content and the site was now mobile.

We have a digital marketing background and started diving deep into SEO optimization. After a many months of tweaking technical SEO attributes we hit a wall. We could not increase our load time no matter what we did. With Google Page Speed Insights we were failing.

We ran a test with a completely blank page, with GTM turned off (it’s back on now) & without content and found that our with Google Page Speed Insights Desktop rating was 78/100 and Mobile was 58/100. This is a blank page mind you and it should be 100/100.

https://www.powproductphotography.com/blankpagespeed

We were ready for an updated design and are moving to a fresh wordpress design where we can control the loading scripts a little better. However, our marketing team will miss Squarespace.

Have you encountered slow loading speeds on squarespace?

In reply to Tom Bukevicius.

Thanks, Tom!

Excellent article, Zack. I particularly like the step where you narrow down on the most important competitor keywords. It’s great not only for large competitor sites but for prioritization of your analysis. Keep up good work!

In reply to Brandie A.

Agreed!

In reply to Brandie A.

Glad you found it helpful, Brandie! Thanks for stopping by!

Super helpful article!