3

Google is like the parent or teacher who is never happy with your work. I've never seen something so unattainable in a world where non-technical clients rely on CMSes, theme templating, server-side page rendering, and external scripting as Google's mobile PageSpeed recommendations. Especially under the Lighthouse audit in Chrome Inspector. Unless I go back to pre-2001 web development methods, and never have external scripting, and make every page have its own CSS file with only critical path CSS for each page, I will never get all the high scores I'm expected to have to rank well for mobile. When and how will Google get called out on this B.S.?

Comments
  • 4
    i get bad results for a slow loading font from google. leaves me speechless.
  • 1
    @erroronline1 yeah. And their Analytics JS is equally problematic. Like, what are we supposed to do at that point if they won’t even make the effort to clean up their own act?
  • 5
    You can choose to not use their slow services ;)

    And to rank among the fastest sites in the world you cannot expect to just clobber together ready made parts.

    You will have to go above and beyond what most do to get there.
  • 0
    @Voxera Google can’t be expected to balance convenience and usability for end users and site owners with performance, like everyone else in the world?
  • 0
    @stackodev It's totally possible. This is for one of the heavier pages on my site, with external CSS, JQuery and some graphics stuff. Browser cache cleared before test, of course.

    How? Http/2, gzip, minify, combine scripts, combine CSS, no side-wide useless selectors, pre-load images that the CSS and script will need, using CSS sprites to combine several images into one.

    And of course not a 100 useless database queries. Google wants speed because users want speed. If that is at odds with an online CMS, then throw it out and go static.
  • 2
    Going static is probably the only way at this point. I’ve done all those things. What I don’t understand is the fact that I’m using a responsive theme that tunes for mobile via media queries and strips out stuff we don’t want showing on mobile so it will load quicker. Images and content, though, aren’t showing up as problems in the report. And the recommendations I can comply with are still showing up as non-compliant. The way the report reads, it’s like building responsively no longer matters and they want a separate mobile site like we used to build 7 years ago.
  • 0
    @stackodev actually not, one for both is fine. It's just that mobile has both lower bandwidth (=load less data) and higher latency (=load fewer files).

    Also, Google cares about the "above the fold" thing. Things like a comment section can keep loading at the invisible bottom of the page as long as you can already read the article above. Means, scripts etc must be at the bottom of the page and/or loaded as deferred.
  • 1
    @Fast-Nop Yup. Above the fold is also optimized and images lazy loaded as much as we are able. And the JS is all deferred except for jquery because deferring that breaks a piece of functionality for this site.
  • 0
    @stackodev every JS can be deferred or at least made async - however, this can require rewriting some parts that were not written with best practices in mind. Or short JS parts can be inlined.

    There's also another way to shortcut round trips especially for images loaded via CSS, and that's "preload" in the document header, along with the right media queries. That helps when pagespeed complains about dependency path length, i.e. more than one level.

    Users hate slow websites, and Google sees it via the bounce rate. For commercial websites, that even bleeds real money.
Add Comment