In an article published on November 11, the Chrome teams show their determination to continue their efforts to make the web ever faster, this time by announcing the reporting of slow pages to Internet users. How do they intend to do this? Will the project be completed? For the moment, the suspense is intense.
The “badge of shame
Some of the reactions to this news have not failed to point out the stigmatizing aspect of this approach, evoking a “badge of shame”:
Soon a “badge of shame” for sites that are too slow on #Chrome
Read more
https://t.co/uzsdUmLU8C pic.twitter.com/vM2IayhVzV– Clubic (@Clubic) November 12, 2019
If we go back to 2015, similar experiments were carried out by Google, which then displayed a “Slow to Load Warning” – the famous “Red Slow Label“. They were short-lived, and consisted in adding a picto (small but clearly visible) or text next to search results to signal pages likely to be slow. A priori,this warning took into account the browsing context, since a site like Youtube was flagged as potentially slow. When asked about the appearance of this label, Google’s response was laconic to say the least: “We’re always experimenting“.
At the time, as is often the case when Google makes announcements, the entire SEO world trembled. In the end, however, the initiative never saw the light of day on a large scale.
Questions still unanswered
Let’s go back to 2019, to Monday November 11, when the Chrome teams unveiled their project. Is this just another announcement? What’s different from 2015 is that this time the information comes from the Chrome teams, and not from users reporting what they’ve observed.
The communication seems more official, but there’s no way of predicting whether it will be followed up or in what terms – although the Chrome teams are autonomous and their commitment to making sites fast is no longer in doubt.
According to the article, the idea is to offer a warning in the browser rather than in the SERPs, and for the time being, the “surface” has yet to be defined. In other words, there’s currently no defined location for this label: is it on an intermediate page after clicking on a link in the SERPs? On top of the page? On a discreet line somewhere on the page? Anything is possible.
Furthermore, would the display of this alert be systematic, or dependent on the user’s browsing context?
It goes without saying that if you’re browsing in Edge, all sites are slow, so a priori no one needs to receive an alert in this case.
Finally, there’s the question of which metric(s) will be used to evaluate page speed. Will it be a “Google-style” algorithm, with a multitude of parameters that may evolve as much as escape us (cf. the Lighthouse score , whose calculation method has just changed to give less importance to TTI, for example)? This, too, remains a rather obscure point for the moment.
What we feel as webperf experts
A site’s performance is expected not only to display quickly, but also to be quickly interactive. However, we feel that warning the general public of a lack of interactivity is complicated, which is why we assume that the most popular metrics will be those that measure display, rather than interactivity. Indeed, when clicking on a link, the perception of speed is based above all on the time it takes to display the page, before being able to interact with it.
So we can’t help but assume that Google’s intention is to relieve its infrastructure.
Why make a site fast at all costs? Not just for UX reasons or out of love for the next person, but also because Google spends time crawling an immense volume of pages.
But crawling can be done in two ways:
- by downloading the HTML page (which allows you to see the Page Speed data in Search Console) ;
- or by observing the rendering of the page, in other words, by loading the page as a browser does, executing the JS… and this rendering has a cost! So, the faster the site, the less time it will take to browse it.
In any case, it’s something to keep an eye on, and we’re obviously curious about the outcome of this project.
What about you? To keep up with webperf news, subscribe to our monthly newsletter:
