Kudos! So finally you’ve built a new website for your company.
But if you’re dealing with a problem that your new, appealing website does not load as rapidly as it should. If you want your website to be adequate from an SEO point of view as well as have the proficiency to create a better conversion rate, the speed of your site is a significant factor. If your website isn’t fast, people will “bounce” away, impeding your possibilities of ranking on search engines.
But you don’t need to worry, as here is a proper guide to how you can score a perfect 100% on Google’s PageSpeed Insights and why doing that is very important.
What is Google PageSpeed Insights?
It is one of Google’s tools that estimates and enhances your website’s performance on mobile and desktop appliances. With PageSpeed Insights, you can observe the all-around performance score of your page.
The score is specified by Lighthouse, which is an open-source tool by Google’s team. Lighthouse operates several audits, incorporating the performance one. After they operate the performance audit and assess various metrics, the Lighthouse team will discern the Performance score (the same score Google PageSpeed provides).
The PageSpeed Insights tool delivers Field data as well. This data is considered extremely useful as it apprehends actual user experience, which is why this data can scantily differ from the lab data and might not always be accessible.
Finally, field data is considered valuable because it’s how Google evaluates the Search Engine Optimisation ranking.
How to Analyze Your Desktop and Mobile Site
Now that you know how slow websites hinder conversion rates, it’s time to extrapolate what are the fundamental issues of your website. It’s widespread for most sites to run slowly because of huge images that take up abundant space. However, that’s not always the case.
- If you want to reach a 100% score on the PageSpeed Insights tool, you need to unravel what exactly is affecting your website to slow down.
- To analyze your desktop and mobile site, you are first required to open up the PageSpeed Insights tool and type in your website URL and click “Analyze” to run a short test on your site.
- The finalized report will tell you everything about your site and what might be clutching its performance back.
- If you view the items that are optimized and improved, you will see how there are only a few items on this list compared to the “Possible Optimizations” list.
- This information allows you to know that the items on the “Possible Optimizations” list are not as influential as the ones that are already optimized.
- But if you want that perfect 100% score, you need to take care of every element on the PageSpeed Insights tool.
- You can begin with the top preference items and then work on your mobile site individually.
More than 73% of mobile internet users assert they have come across websites that take too long to load, which means you need to lower the loading time if you want to maintain visitors. This makes the information in the Google PageSpeed Insights Mobile tab even more beneficial. You can gain a robust edge by just reducing loading times on mobiles and other devices.
What is a Good Google PageSpeed Score?
If you want to know what Google PageSpeed score you should seek, know that the decent scores start from 90, and the score is distributed into three categories:
- Good: Score of 90 or above (Green Zone)
- Needs improvements: Score of 50 to 90 (Orange Zone)
- Poor: Score is below 50 (Red Zone)
The Google PageSpeed score incorporates six metrics:
- First Contentful Paint
- Largest Contentful Paint (Core Web Vitals metric)
- Speed Index
- Cumulative Layout Shift (Core Web Vitals metric)
- Time to Interactive
- Total Blocking Time.
It is essential to remember that each metric holds up a distinct weight, and some metrics are more valuable in discerning your overall score. If you enhance some of them, it will have a more considerable influence on your score than others.
HOW THE WEIGHT IS CALCULATED
The Largest Contentful Paint and Total Blocking Time make a tremendous difference amongst the metrics as they both account for 25% of the all-around score.
If your Largest Contentful Paint or Total Blocking Time isn’t up to the mark, your loading time will be inclined to be high. This is because these metrics are associated with the loading performance and interface of the page.
By boosting these two metrics, your loading time will reduce but how much it will decline relies on the preceding score.
Ways to Improve Page Speed
Now that you understand about PageSpeed Insights and what a good score is, you can start enhancing your site’s performance:
REMOVE RENDER-BLOCKING RESOURCES
One of the common suggestions from Google PageSpeed Insights is to do away with render-blocking resources. This implies JavaScript and CSS scripts that impede your page from loading quickly. In this scenario, the visitor’s browser downloads and processes these files before exhibiting the rest of the page, which signifies having a lot of them can negatively influence your website’s speed.
According to Google, there are two solutions to this:
- If you are not competent in JavaScript or CSS, you can still inline them to withdraw this warning. This pertains to integrating JavaScript and/or CSS into the HTML file.
- The other solution is to postpone your JavaScript. The procedure comprises downloading your JavaScript file during the HTML auditing but only enforcing it after the auditing is done. Moreover, scripts with this characteristic are enforced in order of manifestation on the page.
MINIFY CSS
Typically, CSS files are bigger than they need to be, and this is to make them simpler for people to read. They might include numerous carriage returns and spaces that aren’t needed for computers to comprehend the contents.
To minify CSS, you have to compress your files by excluding unwanted characters, spaces, and duplications. The reason why Google suggests this practice is by reducing CSS file sizes you can practically enhance loading speeds.
KEEP TRANSFER SIZES LESS AND REQUEST COUNTS MEAGER
Simply, the more requests browsers need to prepare to load the pages, and the larger the resources the server retrieves in the comeback, the longer the website carries to load. This is why Google suggests that you decrease the number of required requests and minimize the size of your resources.
MINIFY JAVASCRIPT
Just as you can minify CSS file size through minification, you can do the exact same thing to your JavaScript files, and you can use specific plugins to deal with this for your WordPress site.
REMOVE UNUSED CSS
Any code that is in your stylesheet is content that requires to be loaded for your page to be apparent to users. If there is CSS on your site that isn’t beneficial, you are imposing an unnecessary drain on your performance.
The solution here is the same as removing render-blocking CSS. You can inline or postpone styles in any way that brings in the most significance for your web pages. Additionally, you can also use a tool like Chrome DevTools to discover new CSS that should be optimized.
REDUCE JAVASCRIPT EXECUTION TIME
Usually, JavaScript execution is the most notable contributor to main-thread work. PageSpeed Insights has an independent suggestion to acquaint you if this task has a substantial influence on your site’s performance and it’s also used to settle the warning in your PageSpeed results.
Key Takeaways Most experts would advise you to have Google PageSpeed Insights as a tack in your webmaster toolbox. However, you don’t need to fixate on your score and obsess day and night whether you’ll accomplish that perfect 100% score. Since this mechanism is made by Google, all the UX metrics are based on the site’s performance on the Chrome UX report on desktop and mobile. Google PageSpeed Insights endorses small to mid-size businesses extensively but it can also be helpful for those solo website holders who value modesty and fairness.