We hear a lot about PageSpeed from Google, and there’s no doubt it’s an important metric from both a usability and an SEO standpoint. Of course, there’s a lot more to the web than WordPress, but with it now powering over 59.3 percent of the web and
Google dedicating an engineering team to work with WordPress, it deserves special attention.
Before we dive in, it’s important to clarify that in our article today we’re going to be focusing on PageSpeed, and not page speed.
For those unfamiliar with the difference, PageSpeed is a Google metric. It’s based on a family of tools, and when we’re referring to a PageSpeed number between 0 and 100, we’re referring to the output of the PageSpeed Insights tool.
Page speed, on the other hand, generally refers to the real-world speed of a web page. And yes, it’s possible to increase one without the other, and I’ve even seen cases where improving one is at the cost of the other.
In short, we’re going to focus on the Google metric in this article as it relates to WordPress sites. Whenever you are working on one, it’s important to be measuring the other, too, so as not to shoot yourself in the foot.
Comments