Do PagesSpeed Insights matter in extremely competitive sectors?

Should you obsess on perfect scores of 100 on Googles PageSpeed Insights tool?! We tested 105 websites to find out if PageSpeed insights scores are something to lose sleep over....or are they not that important?

PageSpeed Insights independent study

We tested 105 websites to determine if Googles PageSpeedInsights scores are crucial for ranking in the most competitive industries in the UK. In today's digital landscape, having a well structured website that loads fast with no technical issues and great PageSpeedInsight scores can significantly impact its success, especially in fiercely competitive industries .....or does it?!

​To understand the real importance of these scores, we conducted an in-depth SEO study focusing on the UK's most competitive sectors.

​By analysing 105 websites, we aimed to uncover if websites with great scores have higher search engine rankings or if the emphasis on these metrics is merely overhyped, and more time should be spent on other ranking factors. Let's jump right in! 

What is PageSpeed Insights and whats a good score?

Google's PageSpeed Insights is a tool that analyses the content of a web page and provides suggestions to improve its speed and overall performance. It evaluates both desktop and mobile versions of a website, offering insights on various performance metrics and opportunities for optimisation.
A score of 90 or above is great, 50 to 89 needs improvement, and below 50 is considered poor, according to Google.

Google PageSpeed Insights provides scores for your page in the following categories:

• Performance: This is a weighted average of scores from First Contentful Paint (FCP), Speed Index, Total Blocking Time (TBT), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). It reflects how well your page performs in terms of speed and optimization.
• Accessibility: This assesses factors like ease of navigation, alt text for images, and color contrast to accommodate users with visual impairments.
• Best Practices: This measures adherence to web development best practices, including the use of modern web technologies, optimized code, secure connections, essential meta tags, and effective JavaScript management.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): This evaluates how well your page is optimised for search engines, taking into account metadata, structured data, and mobile-friendliness.

What are the most competitive industries for SEO 

For this study, we chose some of the most competitive industries to achieve top rankings in including:
Online casino
Medical
Finance
Legal
weight loss
Insurance
oh and of course....... SEO (Surely this would be the most difficult industry right? 🤔)

We left out Adult content to keep this independent study PG and our search history clean!

Why are they so hard to rank in? Ranking in sectors like online casino, medical, finance etc are challenging due to high competition, stringent regulations, and the need for trust and authority. These sectors attract numerous businesses vying for top positions, and search engines prioritise content from trusted sources. Compliance with legal standards, frequent algorithm updates, and advanced SEO techniques further complicate efforts, most people would expect the SEO industry to have the best scores overall... but will it?? These efforts often cost huge amounts of time and money to achieve high rankings however the outcomes can be hugely beneficial finally.

How did we pick and test each top-performing websites?

How do you pick the best-performing websites..... well simply by choosing the most competitive keywords for that industry and seeing who ranks in the top positions, we chose organic results only and did not include any paid ad placements! We collected the ranking URL information using Google's very own testing tool: Pagespeed Insights
This tool is handy in seeing speed stats and other issues with a website, give your website a test today to see how you score! Since Google has put such an emphasis on mobile-first indexing we chose only mobile scores for this study.

The results are in!

Best scores for each section

Which industry has the best scores on average for the 4 PageSpeed Insights sections?
Performance - Insurance
Accessibility - Finance
Best practices - SEO
SEO - Finance (oh no come on SEO's we can do better than this!)

Worst scores for each section

Which industry has the worst scores on average for the 4 PageSpeed Insights sections?
Performance - Online casino
Accessibility - Online casino
Best practices - Insurance
SEO - Legal

Average score out of 100 for each section

All website scores combined to find the average across the board.
Performance - 52/100
Accessibility - 86/100
Best practices - 92/100
SEO - 90/100
Based on the competitiveness on these industries you would think all scores would be green however we found an average score of 52/100 for performance, very interesting stats for some of the strongest websites in the UK.

Best overall scores across all sectors

1st - SEO 🥇
2nd - Finance 🥈
3rd - Insurance 🥉
4th - Weight Loss
5th - Legal
​6th - Medication
7th - Online casino

We are extremely happy that the SEO industry scored the highest results on average, the top companies in the UK absolutely practice what they preach here!

Key takeaways

Listen to your SEO guys, they know how to optimise websites to achieve the highest scores, however, a website can still rank highly for extremely competitive keywords with low PageSpeed Insights scores, for example, in the eyes of Google the online casino industry 'needs improvement' across all sections, this industry potential will focus more on content or backlinks over its websites performance....interesting!

Biggest shock
Please note the lowest score we found among some of the highest ranking websites within the most competitive industries was 2 out of 100 😧 

In conclusion we feel that improving your PageSpeed scores is clearly beneficial for rankings but it should only be part of your strategy, you should also focus on quality backlinks, amazing content and external factors like social media.

Head back to our blog for more SEO goodness! Get in touch if you need help with your search engine optimisation in Cornwall.

Author: Dean

Founder of Smart SEO Cornwall. I will be sharing some useful posts on SEO and how to grow your business in Cornwall. Connect with me here on LinkedIn.