Recently, many sites, including large and well-known ones, have been concerned about their site’s load speed. Is it, however, really so important?
According to Semrush, the load time of your page is an important ranking factor.
If you don’t pay enough attention to your webpage speed, you may end up with:
- Traffic loss
It can annoy your page visitors or customers very fast and make them choose another website over yours.
- Low bounce rates
Statistics show that if it takes 1-3 seconds for your webpage to load, it will lead to a 32 percent higher bounce rate.
- Less likelihood that users will return to your site
It’s a known fact that poor user experience influences people’s decision to return to your website.
- Weak SEO
Loading speed affects the ranking of a site in search engines. If the site takes a long time to load, the search engine robot may not have time to index it fully.
What is PageSpeed Insight?
PageSpeed Insights is part of Google’s Speed Tools suite. It is a comprehensive service for measuring actual performance and choosing effective ways to optimize your website by analyzing its web pages, identifying its weaknesses, and offering a solution to speed up page loading.
It’s worth saying that the system does not display the absolute page speed, but rather evaluates the efficiency of the loading and rendering dynamics in the user’s browser. Only factors independent of the type of Internet connection are considered in this case: JavaScript, CSS, HTML structure, server setup, picture size, and so on.
Why is PageSpeed important?
In August 2021, Google released its new “Page Experience” update aimed at bringing a better user experience by analyzing their interactions with a web page.
And the key factors (Core Web Vitals) of the Page Experience update included:
- Loading time – perceived load speed
- Interactivity – time from when a user first interacts with a web page
- Visual Stability – the prevention of unexpected website migrations
What does the tool do?
- analyzes the pages at the specified address;
- enumerates page elements that slow down its rendering;
- does recommendation for resolving page rendering slow down issues.
How to find out your webpage’s speed score?
To inspect a web page, go to PageSpeed Insights and enter the URL of the page to analyze in the search field. One more thing to know, the tool examines the work of a single page on the site rather than the entire site.
How does it work?
In brief, PageSpeed takes critical metrics about the experiences of real users around the world from the Chrome User Experience Report and compares them to yours. As a result, you see the average page load speed and optimization level and the proportion of downloads at slow, medium, and high speeds.
Indicators
The total score for page load speed is displayed at the top of the PSI report. This calculation is based on a load simulation performed with the Lighthouse tool, which analyzes a web page’s load times, availability, and search engine optimization.
Loading speed is measured on a 100-point scale, and the indicators are classified as follows:
- Good – 90 points or higher
- Needs improvement – 50 to 89
- Poor – 0-49
Metrics less than 50 are considered too long to load.
Optimization
Suppose your page does not provide the best results and needs any improvement. In that case, PageSpeed offers detailed instructions on how to improve it in the ‘opportunities’ and ‘diagnostics’ sections.
How to improve your web page’s quick performance with PageSpeed Insights API?
- Compress images
Today strive to upload high-quality visual content. However, in the case of website loading speed, it can only harm.
Compressing your images is one approach to improve web page performance metrics. You can use compression techniques to reduce picture size without sacrificing image quality.
Furthermore, if your website is powered by WordPress, there is a wide range of free plugins that you can quickly install for this task.
- Eliminate render-blocking resources
Removing any render-blocking resources from your site is another great approach to enhance page performance. These resources also contribute to the slowing down of page performance.
In a nutshell, most of these resources link to CSS and JavaScript programming, which slows down the page’s loading. This is due to the fact that each visitor’s browser must first load and process these scripts before the complete page can be shown.
This step requires some technical knowledge. Therefore, you may need professional help.
- Reduce initial server response time
To reduce server response time, check your hosting. If you are using cheap or shared hosting, it may lead to low scores. Make sure to choose a better hosting.
- Reduce the number of plugins you’re using
Having too many poorly coded plugins, for example, might slow down server response times.
- Delete browser cache
To speed up loading, you may temporarily cache some components of the website. Uncached content (HTML, CSS, logos, and images) significantly slow down the loading process.
What’s the use of Google PageSpeed Insights API?
PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is an excellent tool for detecting issues on your site that aren’t necessarily evident. It will most likely not assist in speeding up the site’s loading time, but it will help improve its general functioning.
Many of its optimization suggestions may be quite helpful in boosting the loading speed of your website, using the browser cache, or minifying scripts and images, for example.
However, not all suggestions that the tool makes may be appropriate for your site or compatible with specific plugins. So it’s better to entrust this to a professional. At Aland Cloud, we can help you get a 90+ Google PageSpeed score for your site as part of any plan you choose, including the Basic one.
Conclusion
Overall, the loading speed of your website is critical.
To improve the speed with which your website runs use the PageSpeed Insight tool’s recommendations. It gives helpful tips on how to make your web pages better optimized.