Measuring mobile site speed using Google Lighthouse

7 years ago
/ News
/ By SureFire

There’s always plenty happening in the fast-moving world of online search and advertising. Here’s a summary of key things that caught our eye last week…

Measuring mobile site speed using Google Lighthouse

Most business website owners are aware of the need to ensure their website loads as quickly as possible. Slows page load speeds cost money – users have no patience for slow loading sites and readily abandon them. Plus Google demotes the rankings of slow loading sites in their search results.

With the impending shift by Google to a Mobile First Index the need for speed is more important than ever.

This article highlights a tool most people are unaware of to assess website speeds and find improvements. That tool is Google Lighthouse which is built into Chrome and can be found in the Developer Tools Audit panel.

Unlike other speed measurement tools from Goole such as PageSpeed Insights, LIghthouse gives a more realistic view of page load speeds by simulating visits to your mobile site via a flaky 3G connection on a slightly underpowered device. Packets are lost in an attempt to simulate real-world conditions as authentically as possible. As the article concludes, this is definitely a tool to include in your page speed tests.

Dynamic Creative: Now get 6000+ variations of your Facebook ad

Facebook’s Dynamic Creative works with single image ads and video ads, creating over 6,000 variations based on who is seeing them, and where.

Dynamic Creative will be available in the US first and even then not until next year (but is due before the US mid-term elections).

Changing Google’s domain will no longer give results from another country

Until last week, if you wanted to see Google Search results from another country or language, all you had to do was type Google into the address bar with a different country domain (eg. www.google.co.uk) and you’d be good to go.

Google has announced it will be changing the way it labels country services in Search, so that search results will now be customized to a user’s actual location, irrespective of whichever Google domain is in use. This means that if you’re in Australia and searching on google.co.nz, you’ll now get results relevant to Australia, rather than NZ.

Google’s rationale for this change is that today, around one in five searches on Google is related to location, so providing locally relevant search results is an essential part of serving you the most accurate information.

If you do want to see search results for another country you can still do this, but you’ll need to go into settings and select the correct country service you want to receive.

Bing sees 15% growth in search revenue

Bing may no longer be providing Siri web search on Apple iPhones, but that’s not stopping growth.

Microsoft credits “higher revenue per search and search volume” for a 15% first-quarter increase in search ad revenue, in part due to its LinkedIn acquisition.

Do Review Stars on Google Help Click-Through Rate?

No doubt you’ll have seen review stars in some search results when you’ve done searches on Google. And maybe you’ve wondered (especially if your website doesn’t have review stars) if these results get more clicks than results that don’t have review stars.

This study set out to determine what impact review stars have on click-through rates.

Spoiler alert – according to this study review stars in search engine results significantly improve click-through rates, by as much as 35%.

Check it out…

What we’ve been reading this week…

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About the Author SureFire

These search marketing news updates feature articles of interest picked up through the week by the SureFire team.

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