PageSpeed Insight Speed

[John Mcaulay]

Hi all,

I have a WordPress site which is experiencing significantly better PageSpeed scores when we disable a certain plugin (Sumo - https://sumo.com). I am seeing ~ 30% improvement for mobile when I disable this plugin and ~ 15% improvement for desktop.

The plugin seems to be particularly css and js heavy, which appears to be the root of the problem. I have contacted the plugin developer and after a bit of back and forth this is the final message they sent me:

"I agree. Those reports will always say it that way because they do not take into consideration the fact whether Sumo loads before or after your website has completely loaded - meaning your website is already "interactable" when sumo starts to load itself.

This is because we load asynchronously. Rest assured that your visitors' experience are never affect by Sumo being on your site.

Hope that clears things up. Let me know if you have other questions on this".

So my question is, if what they are saying is true (which I believe it is) will the decrease in PageSpeed scores affect my Google rankings, or does Google take this "time to interactive" into account more so than your overall PageSpeed score?

At this point I think we are simply going to find other plugins to do the work of Sumo, but I was hoping to get some other opinions before doing this.

Regards, John.

[John Mcaulay]

Any thoughts on this anyone?