Google Pagespeed or Google Lighthouse are technical indicators, and even if you are close to the” green zone”, everyone is interested in the question: is it worth pulling up the download speed of the effort and costs that need to be invested?

In 2018, Google presented several tools that help calculate the possible correlation of revenue with the website loading speed. In particular, these are Speed Scoreboard and Impact Calculator. Recently, they have been combined into a single product.

In fact, the calculations of Impact Calculator can be replicated in a regular Excel or Google Spreadsheet file, but it is much more convenient to use additional hints on the Google pages. All data you need is the website’s page speed, average monthly traffic, conversion rate, and your average receipt.

Based on this data, the system will provide the result of possible losses if the site speed leaves much to be desired. It is important to understand that we are not talking about the ranking of the site as such, but about the relationship between conversions and page loading speed.

On the same page, you will find the Benchmark industry leaders indicators, which makes it possible to compare your website with competitors ‘ sites (by a specific page and the quality of communication – 3G/4G).

Perhaps, for someone, it will be more obvious through visualization of the correlation between income and site loading speed among the leaders of the American market.

Seems like the right issue to think about, isn’t it?

The GDPR panic ended within a month of the adoption of the law. Nevertheless, by the beginning of 2020, European companies and website owners were fined 114 million euros. At the same time, the number of law violations continues to grow. Regarding that, the European Data Protection Council (EDPB) has updated guidelines for cookies usage Let’s figure out what is the essence of new explanations.

1. Prohibited to notify about the use of cookies without the possibility to refuse their collection

The practice of “tacit consent”, which was actively used by websites, is no more satisfactory in the case of any law suite. Oops, it’s time to inform guys from Spotify about this.

2. Scrolling, swiping and other interactions with a website do not constitute consent

Therefore, any data collection from users who have not agreed to the use of cookies is strictly prohibited. The regulator emphasizes that any manipulations at the level of interaction, in any case, will be perceived as an offense of EDPB principles.

3.You can not prohibit access to the content to those who didn’t agree with the website’s Cookie Policy

No one can force the user to consent against its will. Access should be provided equally to all participants. The exceptions are cases when the functionality cannot be implemented without collecting data through cookies.

Why is this important?

By the beginning of the year, about 160,000 coolies policy violations were registered in the EU. In the year 2019, the trend of penalty number only grew, Add up to +12.6%, compared to the indicators of 2018, when the law has come into force. If your business interacts with users from the EU, you must comply with the EDPB requirements. At the moment, most part of the burden of the fines falls on the most progressive EU member states, like Great Britain, Netherlands, Germany, France, and Austria. The record holders for fines are still large networks and enterprises. But there is also a noticeable trend towards reducing the “threshold” for entering the “penalty club”. The situation is especially typical for the Netherlands. In this country, the number of notifications of violations is 147.2 per 100,000 of NL citizens.

Of course, the title is quite provocative. Everything strongly depends on the site-specific, since regular HTML pages without any CMS used for backend, can archive such indicators earlier. However, in this note, we are talking about sites based on some popular CMS (for example, WordPress).

High Core Web Vitals indicators are important both for Google and for site users. Slow websites always have a risk that some of your traffic simply will not like your page loading speed and will go away (classic flow like for mobile devices).

Why does your Pagespeed leave much to be desired? What is the problem?

In fact, there are several of them. The first problem is a huge choice between different solutions on the market. There are more than dozen of CSS and JS optimization plugins, as well as caching ones, which have more than 100,000 installations and decent ratings. Bad idea to go through each one in turn and try, right?

Moreover, not all plugins provide a CDN service (a distributed network for storing and delivering files to the user). This means that the number of tools for performing the task of Google Pagespeed growth spreading, which is not the best way which can affect both possible conflicts and usability. The situation is similar with image optimization — the better they are optimized, the higher the site loading speed indicators are.

An important aspect is the processing of external JS files and their storage/optimization. If you look at the contents of your Google Tag, you will see that there is a lot of heavy code inside. This can be a chat for communicating with customers, and analytics system, various pixels (for example, Facebook), and much more. Without being able to influence these scripts, you lose from 10 to 40 points of the page speed. You can check it yourself by deleting the tag code from the site, and then making the necessary measurements.

As a result, clients often come with a situation when they tried to solve the problem on their own, spent time and effort, but did not achieve the desired result. What should they do in this case and is it possible to cope with the Pagespeed task on their own?

Nitropack

Nitropack is a third-party service and concurrently WordPress / Opencart plugin that allows you to solve most of the above-mentioned site problems in a couple of clicks (and not only them). Nitropack has been providing its services for several years, but move into top gear at the end of 2020. Since then, interest in the product has become so obvious that developers have even raised prices (which rarely happens in the startup environment). Therefore, a month’s restful sleep and high Core Web Vitals indicators will cost you $22, which is less than a dollar a day.

On the Nitropack website, you can find a testing tool to see possible improvements to your website before ordering a package. Moreover, there is a modest free tariff, that allows you to try Nitropack service.

Over the past six months, we have installed Nitropack on more than 10 sites. Absolutely all of them have indicators above 90 on mobile phones and 100 on desktops, some (where preliminary code optimizations have been carried out) have 100/100. And that’s why we decided to write this material.

Important! We have no concern with Nitropack developers, and, in fairness, the speed of responses from their support sometimes leaves much to be desired. Fortunately, it is extremely rare you will need to contact them!

Try Nitropack on your project and tell us about your impressions!