Messing with Google Tools

Hi, WAers,

I meant to post this yesterday, but as I was working on it, my screen froze and when I refreshed it, WA was down. Well, the SSL certificates, that is. I thought I had saved my draft before refreshing the page, but I was mistaken.

Anyway, I wanted to talk to you about my experience with Google tools. The more I try to understand them, the more baffled I feel. I have been monitoring my stats on GSC and GA, but I can't quite understand the trends.

I have two sites. I've had the first one for a year already, while my second site is barely 7 months old.

My Results with Google Analytics

My first site is in the travel niche. This week, for the very first time I had a bounce rate of 60%. That's the lowest I've ever accomplished. The session duration also went up to a little over 7 minutes, meaning people are spending more time on my site, which is great.

The bad thing is my visits have gone down. In other words, I've had fewer people visit my site, but those people don't leave as easily and are spending more time there.

My second site is about the French language. Ironically, this newer sites has way more visits than the other site. However, it has a higher bounce rate and a lower session duration.

My Results with Google Page Insights

The mobile speeds of my sites are terrible, to say the least. My travel site speed is in the 20s (yikes!) and my language site is in the mid-40s.

My desktop speeds are way better. My travel site speed is in the upper 70s to lower 80s, while my language site is in the upper 80s to lower 90s.

How can mobile and desktop site speeds differ so much? I just don't get it. I always optimize my images and keep plugins at a minimum, but clearly, that's not enough.

I've also checked my speed on other sites like GTMetrix and Pingdom. My results are slightly better but the difference is not that remarkable.

What to Do?

Out of curiosity, I checked the speeds of a famous travel site, and they're similar to mine. However, that site has way more stuff than mine, so I don't know if this is a good thing.

I've read some articles where they say we shouldn't focus too much on speeds as it is extremely hard, if not impossible, to achieve perfect scores. I don't know. I just know I've run out of ideas, which got me thinking if I should use a different theme. I'd prefer not to.

What do you think? What are your speeds? Do you monitor them regularly? What have you done to improve them? I'd like to know. Thanks for reading.