Google Is Driving Me Crazy!

I just can't understand Google. I've been trying hard to improve the speed of my site with little success. It was terrible the last few days. I'd never seen red numbers until now.

So much has been said and written on the subject. I've read tons of information about it and get more confused each time. Do this, don't do this... It's a trial and error thing.

It seems we shouldn't overlook it since it's a critical ranking factor, much more the mobile site speed if we consider over 50% of people surf the web on their phones.

PageSpeed Insights vs Think with Google

Google has two tools we can use to measure the speed of our sites: PageSpeed Insights (PSI) and Think with Google (TWG). The first one analyzes the speed of our desktop and mobile sites, while the second one focuses on the mobile version.

On PSI I always averaged 50-79 on mobile (which is average per Google's standards) and 97-99 on desktop. So, in general, you could say it's acceptable. However, when using TWG I've always gotten bad results. It always says my speed is slow. Google says load time should be no more than 2.5 seconds. I've seen speeds as high as 5.5 seconds! That's insane!

If you search authority sites like Amazon and YouTube, per Google's standards they have a lot of room for improvement on PSI. You would think they were perfect, right? However, if you check them with TWG, they perform fine. With me it's the other way around.

Are Plugins the Devil?

I know we're supposed to have 5 plugins max, although I think that's impractical if not impossible.

A couple of days ago, I created a TOC for one of my posts. I'd never used one before, but I wanted to give it a try. Most of the ways to do that involved plugins though. Since I didn't want to add more plugins, I had to research until I found how to do it through coding. It took me some time to do it but I was successful.

I wanted to add a hide/toggle button but didn't find how to do that manually, so I used a plugin. This totally defeated the purpose. Little did I know the problems that would arise later.

I don't want to have a plain site. That's why I'm constantly thinking of ways to make it better. The problem is most of the recommendations I come across involve a plugin. If I want to do this, I have to download a plugin. If I want to do that, I have to download another plugin. It's a never-ending story. I wouldn't have to face that if I knew coding.

Tweaking, Tweaking, and More Tweaking

I'm not a techie. Never been. I'm starting to realize we do need to have some knowledge about it. Every time I run a test I get a list of recommendations that I don't understand. It's as if everything were written in another language.

Well, I do understand a few things in layman's terms, but the problem is I don't know how to fix it. They mention next generation images, DOM size, static assets, render-blocking resources, and I don't know what else. What is all of that? :/

Through trial and error, I found a couple of plugins were slowing down my site. One of them was a hide/collapse toggle maker and the other one was a lazy loader. I was able to see a big difference after getting rid of them.

I'd also installed a plugin that was supposed to increase the performance of my site. I forgot the name, but I freaked out when I thought it had messed my site up. I uninstalled it and everything went back to normal.

Now I'm getting scores of 70-80 on PSI mobile and around 90 on desktop. However, the situation didn't change much on TWG. I just decreased my speed by one second. :'(

Bottom Line

I don't know what to do now. I even deleted the ads I was running on my sidebar but that didn't help.

Some people say we shouldn't pay attention to those numbers from Google, while others say the opposite. Who's right and who's wrong?

What's your take on all this? I'd like to know.

Enrique