Google Speed Insights – What You Need to Know
Hi there! Are you in search of information about google speed insights, how it works, how to interpret the results, and above all how to change the result you get? Then, this article is for you.
About Google Speed Insights
Google Page Speed Insights (PSI) is a tool that allows you to test a web page’s speed easily.
It reports a page’s performance on mobile and desktop devices. It also provides suggestions on how to improve website speed.
Both lab and field data are provided by PSI. Lab data is for debugging performance issues in a controlled environment only. Field data is for real-world user experience but with limited metrics.
About Site Speed
A site speed report shows how quick a user sees and interacts with the content of a webpage. Through the report, you can see the areas where it needs improvement to improve the speed. Site speed reports on three aspects, page-load time, execution speed, and how quick the browser parses to make it available for users.
Page speed is measured from 0 to 100: 0 to 49 is considered poor, 50 to 89 needs improvement and 90 to 100 as good.
Why do You Need to Achieve a Good Page Speed for your Website?
Web pages should load quickly, and everyone knows that. People expect to click on a link and see the content immediately.
If a website loads too slowly, chances are people will ditch it. This is called a bounce, technically. People have short patience when it comes to visiting a page, poor website speed means they go somewhere else.
With all the technical factors of a website and the different browsers, plus both desktop and mobile device, it needs a great team of SEO experts to make a website worthy of the users’ attention and perform on search engines.
How to Achieve High Google PageSpeed Insights Score
Enable Compression
With the technology improving every day, the browsers are now capable of serving an alternative version of a page smaller than the original. There are plugins to help shrink pages’ size by up to 90%. If a browser provides a compression version, the loading time is reduced.
Avoid Post-Click Redirects
Your landing pages may show several redirects for different devices instead of directly opening the site. This happens if your page is not designed responsively. A responsive web design has no redirects, which is fast and optimal. For example, website.com.
A website with post-click redirects and poor design commonly has the following pattern:
website.com → m.website.com/home
website.com → www.website.com → m.website.com
This round trip redirection results in a very slow mobile experience because each time a user is redirected, it consumes time. Even a second difference in the load time is big. So, you should have your webpage designed responsively to make sure your user has a quality experience on your site.
Optimize images
The good news is, it is easy to optimize images. You can replace PNG images with JPEG to save page size and improve load time. There are a lot of image compressors available. There are a lot of tools you can use that optimizes images without sacrificing the quality. There are also plugins that smush images to help reduce page size.
But before optimizing the images, do you really need all of those? If they add value to your site, then go ahead and optimize them. If not, then remove them to save data and time.
These are just 3 of the many methods in improving website speed. Remember to monitor your website speed and make the necessary improvements.
Is PageSpeed Everything You Need?
You might be wondering why your competitor with a page speed score of 55 is ranking higher than your website with a score of 86. This is not something you should keep on wondering about. You should be proud that you have unlocked one factor, which is aiming to get the highest page speed score possible for your website. But, that is just one thing. You should work on other factors that will help your website to rank higher than the competitors.
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