If you’ve taken a large chunk of your valuable time to build a website, you want it to work fast or people will click away, using Google PageSpeed can help. These days people aren’t willing to wait for even an extra second for content.
If your site is too slow, they’ve got millions of other choices. If you are running your own website, you need to do everything you can to make sure visitors have no excuse to click off. When it comes to online conversion rates, speed is everything.
Let’s face it; no one wants to open a page that loads endlessly. Here is the good news, you can always use Google tools to fix it and get your page loading at lightning speed. Up next you’re going to learn about Google PageSpeed and how it can help you.
Why Does Website Speed Matter?
When it comes to SEO ranking and SERPS, your webpage’s loading speed will be a determining factor. In other words, if you want to turn your page into a conversion machine, work on its speed. When you look at all the top-ranking pages on Google, regardless of the niche, they have one thing in common: speed.
Understanding Google PageSpeed Insights
In a nutshell, Google PageSpeed Insights is a tool that allows people to test their websites’ speed and how they are performing. To do this, you will enter your URL and click on “Analyze,” and you will get a thorough report about what is slowing down your website.
The report is produced based on two significant parameters, Above-the-Fold load, and Full page load. This tool is compatible with both desktop devices and mobile phones. If your website gets a page speed score of between 85 and 100, it is doing well. However, it would be best if you always aimed higher than 85.
How to Use PageSpeed Insights to Analyze your Website
Before we go deep into how you can use this tool, keep in mind that this tool helps you figure out where the issues are. Most of these issues will need technical expertise to be fixed. As such, if this is not your forte, you might have to get someone tech-savvy to look at your report and help you fix the issues.
Image Optimization
This is one of the common suggestions from the PageSpeed Insights report. Once you click on the “Show how to fix” icon, it will give you the additional report on all images that you have to optimize.
There are two ways to fix this problem; one is by compressing your mages and later uploading them again, the other is by reducing the image’s resolution. I want to assume you are well versed in these terms.
Minimizing CSS & JavaScript
With this, Google will tell you that you have to either eliminate or minimize render-blocking CSS & JavaScript from your website. Likewise, you will have to click on the “Show how to fix” icon to get a full report of the code that is slowing down your webpage speed.
To do this, you will have to eliminate unnecessary white space, comments from CSS & JavaScript files, and characters. If you have programming skills, this is something you can fix for yourself.
Use WebP and CDN for Your Content
This is one of the easiest ways to increase your web performance, and the good news is that it is easy to do. Content Delivery Networks(CDN) takes assets from your page server and, in turn, caches them on their servers. This makes your page load faster.
Using Browser Caching
This is another technique that can help resolve your page’s speed issues. If your page has lots of files and resources, it might take lots of time to retrieve them. Every element and image has to be loaded, and it’s the browser that deals with heavy coding and HTML.
This ongoing process happens every time someone tries to load your website. This is where browser caching comes in, by using it all previously loaded resources are remembered so they are not downloaded again.
Bottom Line
This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to analyzing your webpage’s speed using Google PageSpeed. From putting Accelerated Mobile Pages(AMP) into practice, enabling compression to optimize mobile UX is one of the steps you can take on to analyze and improve your page speed.
Keep in mind that every aspect of your page has to be optimized to get amazing results. Once you get everything going, you could make your website your full-time job.