How Much Is Enough Data? (Google PageSpeed Insights)

[plottsch]

If you've used Google's PageSpeed Insights, you've probably seen: "The Chrome User Experience Report does not have sufficient real-world speed data for this page."

I thought it would be a good resource to discuss here:

• How much is enough "real-world speed data"?
• What's the highest traffic site you've seen that doesn't have field data?
• Can I buy a bunch of (fake) traffic from someone here to get Google to show this?
• Is there another way to find real world data aside from PageSpeed? (Visually you can basically only observe "fast", "decent" or "slow")

 

[plottsch]

Maybe it's helpful if I add some background into why I care about this.

I recently designed a website for a client and he thinks the speed data on Pagespeed, GTMetrix, Pingdom, etc are not real and too good to be true (see screenshot). To be honest, I think he might be right and I'd like to see real-user data.

• ~750 monthly search traffic (for the past 3 months, 200/mo before)
• ~100 monthly paid traffic

View attachment 163419

A competitor, with only ~500 monthly search traffic DOES have enough somehow. I don't know his paid traffic though.

View attachment 163420

Here's the highest organic traffic site I've encountered (9k+ traffic since November, according to UberSuggest):
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http://www.dallaswardrobe.com/

 

[Mr Positive]

I believe they collect this data from the browsers that use Chrome, so if your traffic didn’t use chrome it’ll mean they wont have the data

 

[plottsch]

I believe they collect this data from the browsers that use Chrome, so if your traffic didn’t use chrome it’ll mean they wont have the data

Right, that's a possibility. However, I don't see any reason why the two sites would have a radically different composition of browsers used.