Why You Should Care About PageSpeed

Because Google considers this to be very important while ranking your website

The pagespeed of your website is a critical factor that Google considers when ranking websites. In recent years, the significance of page loading times has grown exponentially. Research conducted by Gomez.com has revealed that more than 50% of users anticipate a webpage to load within 2-3 seconds, and if it takes longer, they are more likely to abandon it. Apart from frustrating users, a slow-loading website also adversely affects Google’s crawl rate and indexing speed. Studies have demonstrated that speed-optimized websites tend to be preferred by visitors and engender greater engagement.

Therefore, if you aspire to augment traffic, enhance organic rankings, and elevate user experience, you must prioritize improving your web pages’ pagespeed. Key areas to focus on include optimizing images, JS, CSS, and plugins. Uploading high-resolution images harms loading times, so it is crucial to consider image sizes. Moreover, limiting the number of plugins to less than ten and turning off unused plugins can significantly boost page speed. Coding a function specifically for your website is sometimes more effective than installing a plugin. Always remember that a fast website is synonymous with a user-friendly website.

Although you can see that this page loads in 5.30 seconds, the vital part of the page is above the fold; this is why the score ranks so well. Above-the-fold loads quickly as the remaining lower portion loads without noticing.

If you could see the lower area of your site, Below the fold, at the same time, you wouldn’t see much more than the raw text and no photos. We add code to the place that only triggers content to load if it’s within the browser window. It allows a page with large amounts of material or photos to not load everything on the page, just what you see. It alone will push your score 10-15 points up.

PageSpeed Tools

The first thing you need to do before you increase your site’s page speed is to check its load time using one of the site speed tools below. Checking from different locations might give you different results, so all speed tools may not give identical results. Therefore, it is better to try out a couple of the tools to get an average time without relying on just one.

Google PageSpeed Insights

This tool helps you to measure the performance of your website on desktop devices as well as mobile devices. A PageSpeed score of 85 or more should tell you that your page has performed exceptionally well. Since network connection affects the site speed, this tool tests only those aspects of your page that are network-independent, namely the server configuration, JavaScript, CSS, and the HTML structure of your page. If you have a low-scoring site, it will show up in red. You need to score 65 or more to get the orange color.

Pingdom Tools

Apart from providing you with the load time of your website, Pingdom also gives you a performance grade that it calculates based on various factors. It monitors your site continuously, checking its speed, uptime, and performance at a nominal monthly charge.

Yslow

Yslow is a free tool that you can use to find out the performance grade of any website that you may visit. It has about twenty performance grades that it applies to rate sites. Also, you can even take advantage of some free advice on improving your website’s performance and speed. You will love how this tool breaks down the details.

Plugins for PageSpeed Speed

One more way to speed up your site is to install a caching plugin. A few good ones below include:

WPMU DEVCheckMark

We put it at the top of the list for a reason. It does cache quite well, but the best thing about WPMU DEV is that it has many more plugins that will do wonders for optimizing your site. It includes apps for SEO, PageSpeed, CDN, image optimization, overall site security, backups, and more. Used by PX Media.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is an excellent plugin that does exactly what it is supposed to do – cache your site.

WP Rocket CheckMark

WP Rocket provides a solution to increase the speed of your site minus risks and hassles. Although this is a better plugin, you must pay for it instead of WP Super Cache, which is free. Note: Used by PX Media.

W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is also an excellent plugin to cache your site and increase its speed. However, it may not work for everyone. It’s a top-of-a-line tool and has many options. There are too many for the less experienced, but once nicely tuned in, it will make your site load very quickly. It is capable of improving a score from 50 to 80 or more.

Suggestions to improve Site Speed

Apart from using a site speed tool and installing a caching plugin, there are many other things that you can do to increase the speed of your website. These include:

  • Moving to another hosting service (You get what you pay for)
  • Minifying JavaScript and CSS(This takes some experience so be careful)
  • Optimizing the images on your site (oversized images are awful for load speed)
  • Minimizing HTTP requests (Fewer files are faster)
  • Enabling the option to compress your web page (Browser caching and server caching)
  • Using a CDN (CloudFlare is very easy to set up) Note: Used by PX Media. Not just for our clients but on our site as well.
  • Optimizing your CSS delivery (This takes some experience, so be careful)

Doing some research might help you come up with many other solutions to increase the speed of your website. Although this might take a bit of your time and effort, it is very much worthwhile to hire a professional.

It doesn’t matter where your company is located, in Pasadena, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, or anywhere in the world. Have PX Media test your site and show you what needs to be corrected and PageSpeed optimized to get your PageSpeed up to par. Contact us for a free site audit.

Plan Your Plan

Just looking or already envisioning what you need. Call us, and we will help prioritize the tasks needed to start your project. We’ll merge your ideas with the latest technology to reach your goals. Done once, done right. The first time.