When stepping into the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for the first time, one of the terms that you may encounter is technical SEO. While encompassing a wide range of goals, one of the main ones is to improve users’ experience on your website. In order to achieve this, a wide range of factors are considered and optimized such as page loading speed and mobile-friendliness of your website, as well as content readability and navigation structure.
All of the optimizations made to these factors have the singular goal of increasing users’ dwell time—the amount of time users spend on a page—and reducing bounce rates—the number of users who leave a site after only viewing one page—by providing them with a positive user experience.
However, with so many things to look out for, it can be hard to gauge whether or not your efforts are actually effective in improving the technical aspects of your website. This is where online tools like Google PageSpeed Insights can come in handy.
What is Google PageSpeed Insights?
Google PageSpeed Insights is a very popular and free web performance analysis tool developed by Google to help SEO professionals evaluate the speed and quality of user experience of their websites by providing valuable insights into the performance of their pages on both desktop and mobile devices.
These insights can then be used to inform future optimizations and help figure out areas of improvement.
What Insights Can Be Found with Google PageSpeed Insights?
Once you’re on the Google PageSpeed Insights website, all you really have to do is enter a website URL before clicking the “Analyze” button. After waiting for around a few seconds to a few minutes, a few scores will be displayed on your screen for both mobile and desktop devices, as well as some insights.
Here are the sections that you can expect to find on your Google PageSpeed Insights report!
Core Web Vitals Assessment
Google uses certain web vitals as metrics and key ranking factors on mobile devices:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This focuses on loading speed, paying extra close attention to the time it takes for the element with the largest memory usage to load.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This measures visual stability and how much the page’s content shifts around while loading.
- First Input Delay (FID): This looks into a website’s interactivity and how quickly it can respond to the first user interaction. Your website will either get a “Passed” or “Failed” mark.
Diagnose Performance Issues
This is the next section directly below the Core Web Vitals Assessment portion and it gives you a numerical performance score ranging from 0 to 100 on the following categories, with a higher score indicating a better performance:
- Performance: This score reflects the overall speed and performance of your website.
- Accessibility: This focuses on the ease of navigation of your website, as well as other elements like alt text in uploaded images, and any accommodations made for those suffering from health conditions, such as higher contrasting shades to help those with visual impairments distinguish between colors.
- Best Practices: This score measures how much of your website complies with web development best practices such as using the latest technologies and optimizing code structures.
- SEO: This measures how well your website is optimized for search engines by looking into different aspects like metadata, mobile optimization, link building, and more.
Opportunities
This section will contain Google’s recommendations on how to improve your website to boost its speed and loading efficiency, as well as search engine rankings, to provide the best experience for your audience.
What is a Good Google PageSpeed Insights Score?
According to Google, getting a score of at least 90 is good and means that your users have been getting a satisfactory experience on your website. A score ranging from 50 to 89 means that your website’s performance is average and needs some minor tweaks and chances, while anything below that automatically means poor performance that will need some major improvement.
How to Improve Google PageSpeed Insights Score?
Everyone wants to get a good score for their website, and there are some ways that you can do this. The first step is to really look into and understand the Opportunities section of your website’s report as this will contain several helpful suggestions on how to boost your score such as optimizing images and minimizing code wherever you can.
However, if you want to ensure that you’ve covered all your bases, here are a few common suggestions that Google’s PageSpeed Insights report may give you:
Reduce Initial Server Response Times
When it takes too much time for a browser to receive that first byte from the server, it can negatively affect and delay the loading speed of your website. To avoid this as much as possible, find a web hosting provider that provides fast servers and minimal delays, while also optimizing the server’s application logic.
You can also migrate your website to faster database systems or find ways to optimize website queries.
Properly Size Images
When your webpage comes with large images that take up a lot of memory, it can significantly decrease your website’s loading efficiency. Google PageSpeed insights go through all your images and show the ones that are far too large, as well as the potential memory savings you can have if you resize them accordingly.
Many online tools and websites can help you minimize the memory that your website’s images use, consequently increasing the loading speed of your website. Some free online tools to look out for include TinyPNG, ReduceImages, and ResizePixel.
Avoid Chaining Critical Requests
Chaining refers to when a webpage needs to download multiple files and assets before loading, with the order of loading happening in sequential order. The downside of this is that it can really delay the loading of important elements. The best way around this is to straighten out your priorities and allow more critical elements to load first before everything else.
Reduce CSS and JavaScript
Both of these are crucial coding languages used in web development and design, but they can significantly slow down your webpage’s loading time. It’s important to reduce the size and amount of code that you use as this will allow your website to load faster, and you can do this with a wide range of tools like Toptal CSS Minifier, Toptal JavaScript Minifier, and more.
Deferring Offscreen Images
Offscreen images are the images that aren’t visible on the immediate page but are still being loaded in the background, but this means that the loading of onscreen images may be compromised and slowed down. By deferring the loading of offscreen images, your website’s resources will be able to focus on the more urgent images that are on the current webpage.
Avoid Multiple Page Redirects
Page redirects forward traffic from one link to another, and they can slow down the loading speed of your website by forcing your browser to go through a redirect chain—when a user is forced to bounce through several consecutive redirects. To prevent this from happening, make sure that your website simply redirects from the main link directly straight to the newest link. You can do this manually or use online tools like Semrush.
Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources
These resources prevent your website from loading quickly as resources like CSS, JavaScript and some font files have to load these before the page itself. Google’s Pagespeed Insights actually helps you identify these resources, so all you have to do is figure out which ones are essential and which ones can be removed.
It’s worth noting that most of these may seem too technical or complicated for some to handle on their own, but there are many web developers and SEO services that can offer a wide range of services to assist you with these concerns.
The Takeaway
By understanding and learning more about what Google PageSpeed Insights can offer, you can use these insights to help your website become much better and leave your users and audience with a positive experience.
Another way to further improve your website is by having us perform a thorough site audit. With this, our SEO professionals will look into every page of your website and recommend fixes and improvements that will help boost your site’s performance. Contact us now!
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