An old saying goes, “the best place to hide a secret is on page two of Google.”
To those in the industry, it goes without saying: rising in the rankings on Google Search is paramount to your audience discovering your site. Users are simply less likely to scan through pages upon pages of results to find what they need. In fact, only 15.7% of users make it to the second page of Google’s SERP.
While the exact workings of Google’s algorithms aren’t specified, they have made it clear that certain technical errors will significantly impact your rankings. In order to mitigate against these errors it’s important to understand what they are and how to calculate them.
We understand that search rankings are essential to our partners. So we’ve made strides to ensure that our products won’t impact your SEO efforts. We ran a series of tests through Google Lighthouse (a free tool that identifies technical web page errors) to highlight how we stack up against the alternative.
We’ll share a breakdown of the numbers, but first, we’d like to give a quick rundown of what these technical errors mean and how, if not taken care of, they can negatively impact your search rank.
- Javascript code: Javascript is a programming language that allows websites to be interactive. The lighter your page’s Javascript code, the better.
- Total network requests: Webpages use network requests to download files and data. Minimizing the number of requests improves a page’s performance.
- Unused Javascript: Unused Javascript files negatively impact page speed. If you want fast load times, you’ll want this number to be low as well.
- Network payloads: Higher network payloads mean longer load times, too. Network payloads also pass on extra costs to users, such as higher cellular data fees.
- Long main thread tasks: A browser’s rendering process translates code into a webpage with a user interface. The main thread handles most of the code (parsing HTML and CSS, building the DOM, and executing Javascript). It’s best to keep these thread tasks as short as possible.
The Results
| OpenWeb | The Alternative | % change | |
| Javascript code downloaded | 99 KB | 348 KB | -71.55 |
| Total network requests | 20 requests | 46 requests | -56.52 |
| Unused Javascript | 96.7 KiB | 150.5 KiB | -35.74 |
| Unused CSS | 0 | 23.0 KiB | ∞ |
| Network payloads | 0 | 150.5 KiB | ∞ |
| Long main-thread tasks | 3,318ms | 3,999ms | -20.52 |
*Our team analyzed two randomly selected web pages from OpenWeb and The Alternative’s respective partner with the Google Lighthouse Chrome DevTools plugin.
It’s plain to see that OpenWeb outperforms the alternative. We attribute this to our team’s dedication to running tests such as Google Lighthouse and Core Web Vitals to ensure that we are the best product on the market. If you want to learn more about our testing visit our blog that outlines our Core Web Vitals results.
