Paul Bakaus, one of the more well-known faces behind Google's AMP project, said a while back on Twitter that it is easier to tell if a page is slow versus telling if a page is fast. He said this after he said that the "whole area" of page speed "is technically very challenging."
In fact, someone quoted him as saying Google is not able to tell if a page is slow, which he did not deny saying:
@andreapernici @bill_slawski @rustybrick the whole area is technically very challenging, which is why I don't comment on it often.
— Paul Bakaus (@pbakaus) December 29, 2016
He then added:
@andreapernici @bill_slawski @rustybrick actually, determining if a page is definitely slow is easier than determining whether it's fast..
— Paul Bakaus (@pbakaus) December 29, 2016
Google's page speed tool does try to determine page speed and in fact, Google has labeled pages as being too slow in the past. But that didn't last. I guess Google can tell if a page is way too slow and act on that, anything more might be too hard.
Which is why maybe Google won't include page speed in mobile first index at the start.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
This post was scheduled to go live today but was written earlier - I am currently offline today.
