Background
in SEO PageSpeed of your blog or website is one of the key factors which Google considers while giving your site higher rank.
It becomes very important for every blogger or online business owners to work on how to increase website speed for their WordPress site.
Page Speed Checker Tools
There are various tools available for free or freemium to check your Page Speed. These tools also provide valuable insights or recommendations to improve the score.
Few of the best tools are as follows
While all are equally good and provide information related to Page Speed, we will focus more on Google PageSpeed Insights on this blog and how to improve google page speed insights score.
As it is from Google it uses the same algorithms to test the page speed what is used in the search query, so it gives a view of how Google sees your webpage or blog.
Please read Free Tools for bloggers and webmasters for effective SEO to know complete list of free tools to perform effectively SEO
What is Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI)
PageSpeed Insights is an online tool provided by Google which checks any website and provides its speed for desktops and mobile. It tests the website in 2 scenarios
- Lab Data – Controlled environments to identify technical issues
- Field Data – Real-world environment from the end-user perspective
Why PSI is Important for your Blog or Website
PageSpeed Insights is important for a few reasons as depicted below
- Tool by Google
- It gives reports on Lab & Real-world data
- It recommends opportunities to improve
That was a small introduction about Google PageSpeed Insights for more information pls click here.
Now coming back to the topic of this blog, how I used Google PSI and its recommendations to improve the Page Speed of blog.
First, I will share the results before I did any optimisation or improvement from PSI recommendation and later show how those recommendations improved my blogs page speed.
Initial results from PSI for my blog
When I ran PSI and other tools for the first time the results were not at all good. It may happen to anyone as we focus on the content creation and do not follow technical aspects of page speed while creating or publishing the posts.
Apart from Google PSI I also ran the test in a couple of more tools. See the results below
Targeting the Heavy Hitters
In my case, the heavy hitters of bottlenecks I identified from the Google PSI results were images, CSS & JavaScript Files & Latency from Hosting Server.
Images
Image is one of the main areas which makes your blog or website heavy or data-intensive. Here also one of the primary recommendations is to work on image size, image format and loading of images
CSS, JS Files
CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) and JS (JavaScript) files are the backbone of your website apart from HTML and take a lot of code and hence increases the size of the website and hence slow to load.
Latency
Latency is the delay happens when the website is being fetched from the server to the client’s browser. Depending upon the location of user and server it varies.
You need CDN or Content Delivery Network. It reduces server response times significantly.
Plug-Ins Used
I used a few free and freemium plug-ins for my WordPress blog to apply the recommendations suggested by Google PageInsights.
Similar Plug-Ins
In case you need more than one or other alternatives of the above Plug-Ins below list are also equally good and can be considered.
Results after Optimisation
After installing the plug-ins and applying the recommendations I ran the test again and impressed by the results I achieved.
I am still working on the improvements to take my score above 95 in Google PageSpeed Insights and will share the experience here.
Sharing the report from GTmetrix post optimisation to cross-check how the other tools are giving the Page Speed results for the website.
In Digital Marketing the single important aspect is to be in front of your customer and Page Speed can help you in achieving that.
Finally…
Page Speed Optimisation is an ongoing process. You need to check regularly the PageSpeed using Google PageSpeed Insights and other tools mentioned above and work upon the recommendations or opportunities to optimise.