Google's Test My Site is just WRONG/INNACURATE

[Laurence Cope]

A customer contacted me with his Google Test my site report, asking to speed it up because the report shows it loaded in 9 seconds. I know that to be wrong, we spent a lot of time speeding up the site already. 

We are in the UK, so I tested with Pingdom from Sweden and it loaded in 1.84s. Pingdom in California was over 4 seconds which is expected, California is quite a way off. Australia 6 seconds. A UK based speed test would be even quicker. 

I tested with Google Page Speed Insights and it reported a 3s load time. 

So where Google gets this 9s load time beats me, and I find it unbelievable these inaccurate reports are being sent to website owners. I am being asked to "speed up my site" and I have to explain to people their site IS fast, especially in the UK where their target market is. 

Google need to make these tests more accurate and at least test sites within the country the website is based, not from the other side of the world where it will be slower. 

P.S. It also makes me quite annoyed Google mark websites down for using its own Analytics file, cant believe they haven't even sorted that out yet (cache time on analytics.js is too low for Google, but they control it). 

Quite frankly, customers swear by these page speed insights results from Google, yet they are just wrong and need a lot of improvement. 

[Laurence Cope]

I notice the i icon pops up with this:

"This is Speed Index, how long the visible content of your page takes to appear using Chrome on a Moto G4 device within a 3G network. Loading time can vary based on server location, device, browser and third party apps. If your site contains carousels, overlays or interstitials, this may impact your loading time results. To perform a website speed test using different settings, visit webpagetest.org. "

Well, it would be very helpful to make this more clear, that its on 3G to stop people emailing me asking why their website is so slow, and confused why its not when they load it in a browser. It would be even more helpful to show results for 3G, 4G AND super fast broadband connection, because its not 9 seconds on my desktop, its less than the Sweden result of 1.8s.