Hello @aupperk24 @edsvcs, @rawphael,
I talked to our team and they are aware of how this and working on actions that improve this metric.
It is important to remember that performance recommendations surfaced in external tools are typically formulated by bots and automated measures to evaluate a site and assign a score or grade. With that in mind, these scores don’t always replicate the actual visitor’s experience of the page load. In the case of chat, the widget is designed to not load until the site is fully loaded.
That means it won’t impact the speed of the site loading, only the overall time of page load. From the visitor’s perspective, the website is loaded and interactable before the widget loads since these are asynchronous actions. Tests like Google PSI measure based on total time to load, instead, so they are tracking something different than what the visitor really experiences on the page.
All that said, we absolutely understand users tracking that number and hoping to see improvement. On our end, we need to balance whether we are solving for the page visitor or solving for the test since the two are not always aligned. We are always investigating ways to improve these numbers and it is on our radar to do further investigation here.
Thank you,
Pam