A user’s initial perception of your website is the amount of time it takes to load. The faster it is, the happier they are.
Over 7/10 of people using mobile internet report having experienced websites that take an age to load. The primary factor that will influence where your website appears in the Google search engine results is the speed at which the page loads. Utilizing Google Page Speed Insights and other similar tools has been advantageous in measuring the user experience.
Your web page should be able to be accessed and viewed in three seconds in order to keep the user engaged and maximize their time on your website. Optimizing your pagespeed not only boosts your standings in searches, but it also enhances the web experience for the person visiting your site.
Today, let’s talk about the perks of utilizing Google PageSpeed Insights to make a strong statement to those you are aiming to reach. You can gain knowledge on how to amplify your Google PageSpeed marks and take advantage of it to quicken your website and make it top-notch.
What Does The Google Page Speed Insights Tool Do?
Google PageSpeed Insights offers marketers both laboratory and actual-world ramifications and is driven by the Lighthouse program. Gathering information from a carefully managed setting can be incredibly helpful in uncovering any troubles with your website’s functioning. Information drawn from the environment where a website is experienced, like user activity and performance measurements, is called field data. This data is collected from the current events as users access the webpage.
Google PageSpeed Insights provides a rating of 0-100 which reflects the level of performance and speed of a website. The outcome evaluation, however, is based on unequally weighted metrics, with some being more important than others. The Google PageSpeed score is calculated using the following metrics:
- First contentful paint- 3x
- First meaningful paint – 2x
- Time to interactive – 5x
- Speed index – 4x
- First CPU idle- 2x
Once the examination is done, the performance evaluation presented by the Google PageSpeed Insights is disclosed. This document is divided into three divisions, showing the overall effectiveness of your website.
- The red color indicates a poor score between 0-49
- The orange color indicates an average score between 50-89
- The green color indicates a good score between 90-100
Why Does Page Speed Matter?
People who use the internet currently are searching for fast responses and fixes. Websites should strive to be as quick as they can.
In addition to improving the visitor’s experience on a webpage, the speed at which it loads has now become a major element – it is even one of the top 200 most influential factors for ranking a website; this spotlighting of page speed reflects its significance for a website’s user experience.
There is an obvious link between possessing a faster website and a greater number of successful transactions. Speed is more than just a factor in ranking pages. A 2019 study by Portent revealed a link between velocity and increased conversion rates. The research demonstrated that beginning from the 0 second mark and carrying on for up to 5 seconds, for every additional second of page loading time, conversion rates fell by an average of 4.42%. The research indicates that the initial 5 seconds of page speed are particularly instrumental in influencing conversion rates.
The results of these studies show that even the slightest enhancement to the pace of your website in terms of Google PageSpeed can have a beneficial effect on your organization.
Is Google Page Speed Insights Accurate?
Google PageSpeed Insights provides various metrics that give an accurate representation of how your website is performing. The alterations to it in recent times have increased its dependability and precision even further.
In November 2018, Google PageSpeed Insights was first launched, and it was known as Google PageSpeed 5.0. It started off by utilizing the Chrome User Experience Report data and Lighthouse inspections.
In May 2020, Lighthouse 6.0 was launched, featuring fresh gauges. The current version of PageSpeed Insights allows for the viewing of these measurements. The fresh measurements gathered have improved the complete operation of the tool and obtained a more detailed user journey.
The improvements to this tool have made it much more dependable, so you can confidently count on your Google PageSpeed result to evaluate how your web page is engaged with and functions for visitors. This tool also provides suggestions to help enhance the areas of your website that need improvement. By utilizing these findings, you can improve the customer’s experience and up your Google PageSpeed grade.
How To Score A Perfect 100 On Google PageSpeed Insights
A better rating on this instrument signifies an expeditious and optimized website. Obtaining a perfect 100 score on PageSpeed is challenging but not out of the realm of possibility. You can use the correct techniques and steps to maximize the speed and action of your website for the best achievable result of 100. Some tips that can be used to score perfectly on this test include:
Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources
This suggestion is frequently seen in the PageSpeed Insights app. This is concerning JavaScript and CSS scripts that are slowing down the loading time of your page.
The visitor’s browser must finish processing and downloading these files prior to being able to view the rest of the page. Therefore, if you have a lot of scripts loaded in the visible part of the webpage, it can slow down the loading speed of your website. Google indicates that two strategies could be employed to address this dilemma.
- If you have a limited number of JavaScript or CSS files, you can inline them. This process means incorporating your CSS and JavaScript into your HTML file, which can be done through plugins. However, this method is only feasible for small websites.Â
- The other method is to defer your JavaScript. With this option, the JavaScript file is downloaded during HTML parsing, but it only works when the parsing is complete.Â
Minify JavaScript
Whenever it is feasible, you should reduce the size of your JavaScript files in a similar manner as you would decrease the amount of your CSS files. When you reduce the size of your JavaScript files, it can help to lessen the amount of time it takes for the script to be read and the size of the data that is being transported. These files can be minified via WordPress plugins. You can also set up a procedure to carry out the minification in advance.
Remove Unused CSS
The information contained in your stylesheets must be obtained prior to the page becoming visible to visitors, as this is regarded as content. Any CSS that is not being applied to your website is consuming resources without serving any purpose. It is suggested that any CSS that isn’t being used be eliminated.
The process of getting rid of render-blocking CSS is comparable. You can either inline or defer the styles, depending on what is best for your web pages. You can use Chrome DevTools as a resource to locate and enhance any unutilized CSS.
Image Optimization
Media files such as videos, sound recordings, and photos can have a negative effect on your website’s speed if they are not appropriately sized or enhanced.
Making your file as small as possible is the easiest way to cut down your page load time. By using CSS, you can decrease the size of the images on your webpage, thus decreasing how much of an impact they make. This technique can be lengthier than just getting them at the appropriate measurement from the start.
My Page Speed Is 100, Do I still need to worry about performance?
Yes.
The PageSpeed tool is useful and will always help to speed up your website, but just because your site evaluated to a perfect score of 100 doesn’t mean that there is nothing more that can be done. In the majority of scenarios, you have the chance to greatly reduce page size and speed up page loading time.
Let us investigate the supplemental steps that can be taken after attaining a perfect score of 100/100 with the PageSpeed tool.
Use a Competitor’s Browser Cache
If your keywords are being ranked a bit lower than that of your competitor, it is probable that the user will visit their web page before they get to yours, or possibly never. It is possible to save the user’s browser cache if they are coming from another site. To do this, inspect the source code of the website to figure out if it is using a public Content Delivery Network (CDN) and which library.
If you both utilize the same library (or libraries) such as jQuery 3.2.1, you can get the library directly from the same public CDN as the one your competitor is using.
You probably realize that this method does not have a high rate of success, and in some cases, it could even serve to advantage your competition if a user visits your site first and then your rival after that.
Although it is unlikely to be effective against other players, this method may usually succeed. Utilizing all accessible open source assets from a public content delivery network (CDN) enables you to reuse public materials from the web browser cache of different websites that the client has gone to in any event once before.
Certain free WordPress plugins, such as Easy Speedup and CommonWP, will link to free themes, plugins, and libraries held on public content delivery networks automatically. Plugins allow large numbers of websites to take advantage of each other’s browser caches with barely any effort.
This strategy may not be optimal for certain people, yet could be effective for others. This may result in a shortened page loading time, even for those who have never visited the page before. The positive outcome is that these open-source elements are sent from a CDN and there are no data transfer costs.
Combine Files, But With Caution
Performance testing tools might advise combining multiple CSS and JavaScript files into a single file so that page speed is improved. This held true in the past, but now things are different.
In a blog post published on the Google Chrome V8 blog Under the title “The Cost of JavaScript in 2019”, Addy Osmani gives advice on decreasing the loading time of JavaScript. He urges breaking JavaScript bundles into smaller pieces if they are bigger than 50-100KB so they can be more manageable. He mentioned that as a general rule, scripts larger than 1 KB should not be inlined.
It is not beneficial to group smaller files together as it does not accelerate page load time and may have an adverse affect on the speed on mobile devices. Due to HTTP/2 multiplexing, multiple queries and answers can be occurring concurrently, thus diminishing the amount of extra inquiries.
Do you need to reconfigure the coding of your website to get back to the original way of doing things? You may want to think about turning off plugins that make this capability available on WordPress websites. This will minimize the amount of plugins that are added, thereby increasing the speed of your website.
Nevertheless, it does not imply that dividing all of the JavaScript code into multiple smaller files will not be disadvantageous. You will need to test your use case carefully.
Toggle Between Image Formats
A large amount of a page’s loading time comes from the loading of images. So, they require far more concentration than the regular approaches for picture adjustment that are in frequent usage.
If you are using images for your website, you should look into what type of image file format works best for the content you are putting up. Certain image types are better for vector images, and some yield superior results with photos.
Differentiate Dynamic vs. Static Compression
This could significantly increase your website’s speed with minimal effort required, and is probably the least difficult of the methods I’m proposing. Let me explain.
A lot of webpages typically incorporate a script from the internet in their .htaccess or NGINX setup document to facilitate Gzip or Brotli data compression for all materials that can be compressed. This works but leaves room for more optimizations. Websites can save more than 50 KB of space just by using more efficient Brotli compression. Want to learn the trick? It is simple. Differentiate dynamic compression from static compression.
The material that your web server holds can be categorized into two distinct types, dynamic and static. Dynamic content is created in real-time and cannot be pre-compressed. HTML pages are an example of this. The immobile material, such as CSS and JS, remain untouched for a while.
You can compress the assets ahead of time and set up your server so it serves the pre-compressed files instantly. Before compressing, it is possible to use a better level of compression, such as Brotli:11, which would usually be too slow if done in real-time. You can also employ a third-party service such as PageCDN, which makes pre-compressing files less of a chore each time a file needs updating.
Reduce DNS Lookup Time
The amount of time it takes to find the IP address associated with a given domain name is known as DNS lookup time. This IP address is employed to discover the server’s spot on the web.
Whenever someone visits a website, the first task with a long waiting period that browsers take on is finding the domain name using DNS. Unless a web browser can acquire an Internet Protocol (IP) address through a Domain Name System (DNS) inquiry, it is unable to move forward and establish a connection to the host computer, as well as making a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request.
Conclusion
The PageSpeed tool is very effective in pointing out capacity problems, yet there are still optimizations that can be made to leverage the fullest potential of the available tools and technologies. I have endeavored to include all of the optimisations of which I am aware. I’ve gone over some extra information that could be helpful for you. This will enable you to stay one step ahead of your competitors.
