Speed Index

What is Speed Index?

Speed Index measures the speed and progression of visual content loading on the web page.

Google Lighthouse records a video of the page loading process, and it looks at the visual progression from frame to frame. This is an expected user analysis of the user’s loading experience. And it’s calculated as the metric “Speed Index”.

Does Speed Index influence SEO?

Speed Index is not a ranking factor for search engines. While speed test metrics will not directly affect your website rankings, they are important principles for great web developers to understand. Bad scores that indicate a bad user experience may hurt your SEO if users bounce from your website.

What is a great Speed Index Score

We want a fast and speedy Speed Index of 3.4 seconds or less on Page Speed tests.

How to optimize Webflow websites for Speed Index

• Remove as many unnecessary third-party scripts as possible.
• If you can’t remove certain third-party scripts, apply async or defer.
• Optimize images and videos. Resize and compress all images and videos. Compress all images with a free online compression tool. Use modern and more compressible file formats like WebP, instead of PNG or JPEG.
• Load management. Set specific elements to "load eagerly" in Webflow. Improve Speed Index by loading your most important content first. Then, lazy load any elements that are not crucial to the user's visual experience.
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that specializes in delivering your files efficiently.
• Preload important resources. Use the <link rel="preload"> tag to preload specific elements.
• Optimize font in the project. Remove any unnecessary fonts and font weights in the project. Self host fonts. Font can be heavy and influence page load. Improve the font visual delivery by using font-display: swap. This makes sure text is visible during font loading.