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Google Updates PageSpeed Insights With New Data From Lighthouse

Speed is a killer. Website visitors have unrealistic expectations regarding lighting fast loads. Time, like money, but be explicitly managed or you can lose prospective customers before they even get to your first web page. It’s time to supercharge your website’s mobile load times! So when your website takes even an extra second too long to load, you risk losing visitors.

Sluggish load times only frustrate visitors, causing them to leave your website and even deter them from returning in the future. Luckily, you can fix your website’s glacial-paced load time with help from Google’s new and improved PageSpeed Insight Tool. The new update – originally launched in November 2018 – uses Lighthouse, a speed tool from Google, alongside field data provided by the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX).

A Bit About Google Lighthouse and CrUX

Now in its 5th version, Google’s official release notes state that, “v5 of the API will now provide CrUX data and all of the Lighthouse audits. Previous versions of the PSI API will get deprecated in six months.” So what exactly does this mumbo-jumbo mean? It means that you can receive better insights to supercharge your website’s load speed. Let’s break down some of the data Google’s improved tool offers:

Field Data: With help from the Chrome User Experience report, this data reveals the First Contentful Paint (FCP) and the First Input Delay (FID).

Lab Data: Lighthouse will analyze the current page on an emulated mobile and plots helpful metrics from that tool including First Contentful Paint, Speed Index, Time to Interactive, First Meaningful Paint, First CPU Idle, and Estimated Input Latency. Lighthouse will then serve up screenshots of how visitors view the web page on their mobile phone or tablet.

Opportunities: Sometimes, specific web pages may be the culprit behind a sluggish load time. This data shows websites owners various ways to improve that page’s performance by breaking down problematic elements, as well as how to fix it.

Diagnostics: Factors like caching, DOM size, payloads, and JavaScript can affect a website’s performance. Luckily, this report identifies which elements are out of whack, and how you can fix them.

Audit: Finally, this report tells website owners how well they did on various audits including Minify JavaScript, CSS, redirects and so much more.

Getting Up To Speed with Google PageSpeed Insights

Google said version 4 of the API will become deprecated in May 2019, so you will need to upgrade to version 5 soon. Reducing your website’s load time should be at the top of your to-do list. Failing to do so will frustrate customers, meaning that you’ll eventually feel Google’s wrath with a dreaded drop in ranking. The greatest way to increase your website speed is to make sure you work smarter, not harder. Google rewards websites that deserve to appear at the top of SERPs, so take advantage of Google’s tools so that you can prove to the search engine giant that you belong at the top.

Web users these days are impatient and demand instant results. For more helpful tips, tricks and hack to optimize your website and improve load time, contact the web development professionals at Premiere Creative today or give us a call at (973) 346-8100.