What is PageSpeed Insight?
Google’s PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a free tool that evaluates the performance of your web pages on both mobile and desktop devices. It provides key metrics like Core Web Vitals, to help gauge the overall quality of the user experience.
Your PSI score is split into mobile and desktop, as well as three other factors (accessibility, best practises and SEO) to create one final performance score. Here we can see a website that has passed Core Web Vitals.
Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the page. Google recommends websites try to obtain a pass for success within search and greater user experience.
Below you can see a screenshot of a mobile score of 9 from a website.
When scrolling down, we can see a list of diagnostics that outlines why the website has received a score of 9.
Although this website has passed Core Web Vitals, it’s score of 9 is due to the reasons above. SEMrush considers anything below 50 points to be poor, 50-89 needs work and 90+ is a great score.
Why is it important?
Google has confirmed that page speed is a ranking factor when it comes to crawling websites. Slow load times often frustrate a user and will drive them to leave the site, but a fast website will encourage users to stick around and engage. This is part of user experience, and search engines like Google will favour your siteif your page experience is great!
A tool like PageSpeed Insights can’t fix your website for you, but it can provide ideas on how to improve it and increase the likelihood of reaching those first page spots.
What can I do to improve my PageSpeed Insights score?
Avoid redirects where possible
Every time a user is redirected, page rendering pauses which adds valuable seconds to the page’s load time. You can use tools such as the SEMrush audit tool or a manual crawler like Screaming Frog to find these redirects.
Remove render-blocking resources
Render-blocking resources slow down a webpage’s loading speed because the browser must load files like CSS, JavaScript and fonts before it can display the page. Have a look on the diagnostics list to find the resources you can remove to help improve page speed. If you aren’t familiar with coding languages, you may need a developers help to find and remove these roadblocks.
Reduce image size
Large images can reduce page speed by a significant amount – ideally images should be held on a CDN (content delivery network) to improve page speed and reduce bandwidth. If you are unable to use a CDN, we recommend using the Squoosh website to manually decrease the size of the images and use the Enable Media Replace plugin in WordPress to change the images to the new optimised version. You can also use plugins such as WPRocket or W3 Total Cache to reduce image size.
Reduce CSS & JavaScript
CSS and JavaScript are an important part of modern websites and are crucial to the running of your website. Unfortunately, they’re often much larger files than they need to be. The easiest way to reduce these is to use a plugin to minify the code for you. We mentioned W3 Total Cache above, which is great for minimising these files. Ideally, you should back up your website before attempting any minifying just in case things go wrong!
Third Party Code
Third-party code such as scripts, pixels and plugins can reduce page loading speed and lower your PageSpeed Insights score. Some codes are important like your Google Analytics code or the Meta pixel, some codes are redundant, such as old platforms or tools you no longer need. You can see if these are impacting your site speed in the diagnostics list by checking which ones are no longer relevant and removing them from the back end of the website or your Google Tag Manager.
PageSpeed Insights is a valuable tool for evaluating and improving the performance of your website. While it doesn’t necessarily fix issues, it provides valuable insights and recommendations for optimising page load speed and overall user experience. A faster, well-optimised website will not only enhance user satisfaction but also boost your chances of ranking higher in search results, making it a crucial part of your SEO strategy.
If you want to improve your website’s user experience and improve your rankings, feel free to get in touch with our expert SEO team at WorkPR and see how we can improve your online presence today.
