Web Design Blog

Why is it SO DANG HARD in ecommerce to get a fast mobile PageSpeed, and am I wasting my time trying to achieve a better time?

If there’s one thing that makes me feel like an enormous loser, it’s running Google PageSpeed scores on my website.For mobile, depending on how the test is feeling at a particular time, I’ll get scores between 10 and 25 on mobile—and between 60-85 on desktop. Seeing myself so deep in the red makes me feel like a GIGANTIC fucking loser, and it makes me desperate to try to get rid of a bunch of shit on the site to achieve a faster score.It eats at me to the point where I consider eliminating functions on the site that add genuine, real value, just to get a PageSpeed boost. I’ve considered doing such hugely moronic things as: Getting rid of a reviews app (despite reviews being so critical in ecommerce); further compressing my already highly-compressed images to the point that they would be blurry and look like shit (on a site that sells wall art, no less); deactivating the “Buy Now” button that allows them to go straight to checkout; etc. Trying to improve the speed scores turns me into a huge dumbass basically, considering doing stupid stuff just to see that red turn orange.The thing is, when I test competitor sites in my same industry — huge, behemoth companies that get tons of traffic and have huge budgets to improve their site speed — their scores are shit too! Sites like iCanvas, GreatBigCanvas, even Amazon itself — all of their mobile PageSpeeds are in the red too! Somewhere in the ballbark of between 20-30. All of them also FAIL the Google CoreVitals test on mobile.So when I see that, from such huge successful companies that have titanic budgets to spend on these things, it makes me think: Maybe I’m wasting my time and overthinking this? Maybe it’s easy to get faster scores if you’re just doing something basic like hosting blog articles, or having a landing page that describes attorney services and tries to get leads to book a call — but a highly interactive product page for commercial sales of visual products like wall art? Maybe there’s only so far you can push this–and chasing high mobile PageSpeed scores for such a site is like chasing a leprechaun at the end of the rainbow?Your thoughts on this? Specifically, how do you strike that tradeoff between: Having features & functions on your site that genuinely add value (yet increase page weight and cause load times to be delayed), vs. eliminating a bunch of stuff to boost load times (while simultaneously getting rid of features that add value)I see all the stats on how “X extra milliseconds in load time causes a Y percent drop in conversions”, and I get that — but then I see all these companies who are just flooded with customers *also* have shit load times, so maybe it’s not where I should focus my energies on?This is something I truly struggle with, and I’ll go through phases where I’m wearing my “increase page speed” hat and I’ll maybe push it too far in one direction, then I’ll go through another “add more functionality on the site” phase to where I’ll do stuff that will decrease the load times.Any insight into how you think about this and balance these different factors would be much appreciated, because this really is something that frustrates me and makes me feel like a huge loser.Example product page of my site is — > https://nextlevelartwork.com/products/velociraptor-funny-classy-dinosaur-portrait-poster-or-canvas-artOne thing I will note, despite whatever the almighty Google test tells me: My site doesn’t feel slow when I use it, whether on mobile or desktop. Even after I completely clear my cache. To me, it feels reasonably smooth and fast. Maybe that first load, initial, cache-less load on mobile will take a little bit, product pages do take a few seconds to fully load everything to the point where scrolling & interactivity is 100% smoothly responsive, but it’s not agonizing, and after that point, the rest of the site session feels pretty smooth. So maybe I’m overthinking this and putting too much stock into Google telling me I suck, vs what the actual felt user experience is.Thanks!