Finding Site Speed Issues And How To Fix Them For SEO

Google have been taking site speeds into account for over a decade now, initially just on desktop around 2010, then onto mobile devices too in July 2018.

This information wasn’t very good initially, but we eventually got the Core Web Vitals (CWV) reports in Google Search Console (GSC). This meant that we could see issues in more depth and see which specific issues were affecting sites, rather than just being labelled as slow.

This is changing again slightly in early 2024, but the fundamental speed issues are the same. So, whatever it’s called, you need to make sure that your website is fast to help it rank and convert.

via GIPHY

What Can You Do?

If you haven’t already, make sure you have a Google Search Console account, and get the whole domain information from your site – not just the prefix version. If you’re unsure what you’ve got, find out more here.

This will populate the Core Web Vitals report, showing you the performance of pages on mobile and desktop. They will be grouped into poor, good and needs improvement, and you should focus on the mobile results first. One will probably affect the other, so any changes can be done incrementally to see the affects.

via GIPHY

There are other tools to check on page speeds too, with Google’s own Lighthouse reports being the preferred method. This can be accessed through Chrome by using the inspect element tool. Again, more information can be found here.

It’s best to run this tool in an incognito browser to remove any...