Google Introduces Speed Monitoring in Search Console

Website speed is very important for ecommerce SEO. Frontend performance should be part of your daily web development routine by using tools like PageSpeed Insights. In the last couple of days Google has rolled out speed monitoring as part of the dashboard in Google Search Console. This really confirms the importance of frontend performance and it also makes it easier for you to be on top of how your site is developing in regards to speed.

Under the enhancements section in your Google Search Console you find a new, still experimental, section dedicated for speed. The data for the speed report comes from the chrome user experience report and thus reflects actual usage data of your sites around the world. There is a separate mobile and desktop report, with mobile coming first.

With this new tool you can easily monitor the frontend performance development of your website. You directly get feedback on URLs that are slow. Very useful when choosing which parts of your website to speed up next. If you do not already have tools like lighthouse as part of your automatic testing during website deployment you can use the Google PageSpeed Insight tool to track changes in performance new updates are done to your website.

To stay on top of the performance you need to be monitoring your site performance from the relevant locations around the globe. You need to make sure your infrastructure is globally distributable and that you use fast APIs.

It is still early days, but it will be interesting to follow the importance of frontend performance going forward. Lets all go millisecond hunting.