Should I be concerned about low score on PageSpeed Insights?

Technical Q&A
1

Hi All,

I recently started looking at the loading speed of my site (http://naturalethoshk.com/)
I used the Online store speed report by Shopify and it says that my site has a score of 25 and “A speed score of 25 means the same speed as similar stores on Shopify”
The above suggests to me that the speed of my store is not having a problem.

However, I have further looked into the speed of my site on the PageSpeed Insight tools,
PageSpeed Insight tools is giving my site a score of only 20 for mobile and 66 for desktop. It also say “the aggregate experience of all pages served from this origin does not pass the Core Web Vitals assessment.”
This seems to suggest that my site needs a significant improvement in speed.
Should I be worried about this? Or should I be relaxed given the result of Shopify’s Online store speed report says that my site is performing at similar speed to the others?
Will a low score on the PageSpeed Insight tools negatively impact my SEO rank?

Thank you for your time.

2

Hello @mo_kk !

I’ve just tested your site with Google Pagespeed Insights. It’s very fast for a Shopify store, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it!

There is one app that seems to be taking up a bit extra load time, Privy. You might want to look into alternatives, but honestly, it’s not needed. I’ve seen much worse.

If you absolutely want to increase your page score (it’s going to be difficult to do better than that), you can look into some of the tips in this thread: https://taptimize.com/blog/increase-shopify-page-speed

Let me know what you think!

Nathan

3

Thanks for your reply Nathan!

Why would the Google Pagespeed Insights gives me a score of only 20 out of 100 in this case?
Is it just simply that the assessment criteria used by Google are too strict?

My biggest concern is with its comment of “the aggregate experience of all pages served from this origin does not pass the Core Web Vitals assessment.”. Do you know if the website’s SEO can be negatively impacted by this?

4

Hi mo_kk,

I strongly suggest working on the page speed insights recommended. From my experience, it affects the SEO value of the website.

5

Honestly its not too strict. Google set its standard of an ideal score of 100 to a global audience. I’ve been having issues with my cellphone service provider recently, I can up site like Wikipedia, google, amazon, and others just fine, but most shopify site’s I visit take forever. However when I’m at my office everything loads fine.

The point is that your audience makes a big difference as to how much you should worry about your site speed.

If 100% of your audience is large city resident in the USA, then you probably don’t need to worry about page speed.

If 50% of your audience is from rural areas where they’re less likely to have faster service, then you should be more concerned about your speed.

If 100% of your audience is from South American, Or Africa, then you really should worry about your speed, because there’s a good chance you’re loosing most of your customers.

Google offers metrics on how your actual visitors perceive your site loading metrics,

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Here most of your users have a fine time with LCP and CLS.

LCP is how long it takes to load the largest element your users see when they load the page. In your case your hero carousel, and CLS is how much content moves around as a user loads the page, so you pass those two metrics.

You could do better for First Contentful Paint.

To improve there you could have a developer optimize your site, it usually takes me about 1-2 hour to optimize FCP. Or you could switch to a theme that already has all of its content optmized, like most of the free themes.

As for First Input Delay, you can read about it indepth here https://web.dev/fid/#what-is-fid. For improving this I recommend you hire a developer to help you.

People get really obsessed with there score because google announced it affects ranking, which it does, but we don’t know exactly how. I think the most important thing is you treat it as a guide, and use the information PSI provides to help you decide if your audience is having an optimal experience on your site.

1 Like
6

Hello, PageSpeed Insights (or Google Lighthouse), is important.

It gives insights on both mobile & desktop. (Much better than tools.pingdom.com for example).

If your score is very low (we all are around 30 with mobile), then yes you have a problem. And I have one too (working on web dev to fix it).

Regards,

7

Hello i have the same problem and want to find out which app is slowing my store down.. do you mind testing mine? Thank you in advance.