After my old website (actually domain name) was lost and converted into a health blog, I started looking for new solutions for a personal homepage. And while I could turn this into a discussion about backing things up if you want to get them back, that’s old hat at this point. Yes, I lost my personal blog posts, but you guys don’t care.
What’s interesting is that when I temporarily threw a website onto Google Sites, I discovered that Google Sites, Google’s product, performs poorly on PageSpeed Insights, a tool from Google to improve the mobile web.
This is a Google site with a single small image and lots of technical issues that cause it to load slower than it should. You can view the lighthouse tree map here. Google’s own third-party code, like fonts, and Google’s CDN create a lot of bloat.
Speaking of Google’s CDN, Cloud.google.com, Google’s web hosting product, scores an excellent 21 points on Page Speed Insights.
WordPress.org gets a score of 66, not exactly great, but also better than my single-image Google site and the Google-owned hosting company’s site.
Page speed is important for both user experience and search engine optimization, Google repeatedly claims. But Google isn’t leading by example, at least I can’t say that.
“Wonder why no taxis will stop for him” by Singing With Light is marked CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
