If you don’t know already, but the speed at which your website loads is a key performance indicator for Google’s search rankings AND for your human visitors coming to your site.
But there’s a lot of confusion with what actual metrics should you be looking at?
After all, not all site speed performance tools are created equal.
The grading you get with GTMetrix is different from what you get from Pingdom’s tools.
Personally, I don’t put much stock in the actual grading these tools give.
I always tell my clients now, not to take the actual grading too seriously. Adam from wpcrafter, gives a really great explanation why he doesn’t either.
Why?
Many of the factors are out of your control, many of the “F”s that are given have to do with assets from your WordPress theme or even Google scripts themselves.
The handful of factors I tend to look at now are:
- Time to first byte (TTFB)
- Page size
- Page load time
But, what we really need to know, that this article from Siteground really explains well is (I do recommend Siteground as an entry-level web host and we’re also an affiliate, FYI), are these tools measuring the requests from your actual web server or from a CDN location (assuming you’re using a CDN = content delivery network).
If you aren’t already, you should be using a CDN to help with improving your site’s page load speed.
The main lesson is, page speed matters. Page speed is important.
Just ignore the “gradings” the speed tools give you and focus on improving ttfb, page size and page load time.