For many website owners, it’s their white whale. Getting a perfect score on PageSpeed Insights is the impossible quest that will magically solve all of their page speed woes.

But is a high PageSpeed Insights score the be-all and end-all of fast page load times? Sorry, but no. If your focus is on improving your site’s page load times, finding a better ASP.NET host will often take you further.

In this post, I’m going to run a real test to show you that high-performance hosting will do more for your page load times than endlessly striving to improve your PageSpeed Insights score.

Google PageSpeed Insights. What is it?

If you’re not already familiar, PageSpeed Insights is a Google-offered tool that helps you both analyze and optimize your website’s performance for desktop and mobile visitors. Before I get into what exactly that entails, let’s talk about what PageSpeed Insights is not:

It’s not a tool that gives you a real number for how long your page takes to load. You need other tools for that. Instead, PageSpeed Insights gives you a score from 0-100 based on how well your site is technically optimized, with separate scores for desktop and mobile.

To calculate this score, Google uses two metrics (direct quote):

• time to above-the-fold load: Elapsed time from the moment a user requests a new page and to the moment the above-the-fold content is rendered by the browser.
• time to full page load: Elapsed time from the moment a user requests a new page to the moment the page is fully rendered by the browser.

And while Google’s suggestions are important, they readily admit that the test “only considers the network-independent aspects of page performance”. That means PageSpeed Insights does not, among other aspects, directly consider the speed of your host.

So while PageSpeed Insights gives you great suggestions for speeding up the technical aspects of your page, getting a perfect score on PageSpeed Insights will never be enough to completely overcome a slow host.

In Google’s own words, the “absolute performance of the page will still be dependent upon a user’s network connection.”

* It should be noted that Google is also talking about a visitor’s personal Internet speed.

Is it Really Important to have High PageSpeed Score?

Plenty of data says that users care about how quickly your page loads in absolute terms. Akamai found that, at least for eCommerce sites, 30% of users want sites to load in under 1 second. And on mobile, 74% of users will abandon a site that takes longer than 5 seconds to load.

But as we learned in the previous section, PageSpeed Insights does not calculate the absolute page load time of your site.

So, is it Important to have High PageSpeed Insights?

Yes and no. A higher PageSpeed Insights score will likely improve the speed of your website. It will get you a quicker loading site.

But here’s the thing:

Your website will only ever be as fast as the hardware that’s powering it. A high-quality web host and good caching will almost always take you further than a 25-point improvement in your PageSpeed Insights score.

I have tested my ASP.NET site in ASPHostPortal hosting, with simple ASP.NET site.

Using those settings, I’ll run each site through PageSpeed Insights and use Pingdom Tools (testing from San Jose) to calculate the absolute page load time for each site. I’ll use PageSeed Insights’ Desktop score for the purposes of this test.

Testing Result – PageSpeed Insights vs Faster ASP.NET Hosting

After running the tests and crunching the numbers, here are the results I came up with.

ASPHostPortal Test 1 – Unoptimized PageSpeed Insights score:

My unoptimized ASPHostPortal test site had a mediocre PageSpeed Insights score of 66/100:

Pingdom’s calculated page load time was better than I expected, clocking in at 2.00 seconds. That’s actually not horrible. But remember that I’m testing on a dummy site without much content:

ASPHostPortal Test 2 – Optimized PageSpeed Insights score:

After making the tweaks I mentioned above, I got the PageSpeed Insights score for my ASPHostPortal test site up to 90/100. A major improvement from 66 and worthy of the coveted “green” seal of approval:

So what was the effect on actual page load times? A marked improvement to 947 ms.

Summary

I don’t want you to come away from this post thinking that you should ignore Google PageSpeed Insights. The people at Google are way smarter than I am. They know what they’re doing.

All I’m saying is this…

Focus most on what’s actually important – absolute page load times. PageSpeed Insights is not the end of your optimization journey. Nor should it always be your primary focus.

When it comes to absolute page load times (the important thing!), switching to a faster ASP.NET host and implementing good caching will have a much larger effect than trying to go from 66 to a 90 PageSpeed Insights score on sub-par hosting.