Recently, our team has raised a goal regarding our website’s user experience. We have aimed to reach a score of 100 out of 100 using Google PageSpeed Insights tool and we have done it. Before we get into details as to how exactly we reached 100/100 on Google PageSpeed, let’s talk about a few other important points.
While it is very important to have a speedy website, a full user experience of the website is more important. Therefore, you shouldn’t obsess over 100/100 as a lower score might still get you the kind of performance you want. Optimizing your website’s speed is about finding the right balance between high performance and the user experience you want your visitors to have.
What is the Google PageSpeed Insights tool?
Google PageSpeed Insights is a tool created to enhance your website’s performance. It can easily help you improve the speed and mobile-friendliness of your website by offering you recommendations on what exactly needs to be changed. It measures the performance of both: mobile and desktop interfaces of the website. When performing the check, the URL of a website is fetched twice, once with a mobile user-agent and once with a desktop user-agent. This way suggesting improvements for both user interfaces. Applying the suggestions made by Google will improve the overall performance of your website, however, it will still be dependable on your network connection.
Time to above-the-fold load and time to full page load is what Google PageSpeed Insights tool measures before suggesting any changes to be implemented. Time to above-the-fold load is how fast the content above the page fold is loaded by the browser and time to full page load is how long it takes for the browser to load the content of the full page.
Is it worth optimizing your website with PageSpeed Insights?
According to the research Google has conducted, any delay that is longer than a second interrupts the natural flow of thoughts which then causes poor user experience. Nowadays, slow loading website can easily cause you a big chunk of your revenue. While there is a countless number of speed optimization methods, we used the PageSpeed Insights tool to optimize our website.
Not only is it good for user retention but also it’s good for SEO. It’s no secret that search engines love speedy websites, therefore rank them higher than those with a low loading speed.
It’s also very easy to use. Once the website URL is analyzed, Google then presents you with steps to follow for your website’s speed to be optimized. Some of these steps are more technically challenging, but most of them are easy to perform using almost any content management system (CMS) out there.
In short, optimizing your website’s speed with the PageSpeed Insights tool can turn out to be greatly beneficial and easy to achieve, however, before applying any changes suggested, make sure that your overall user experience will not suffer.
A step-by-step guide to optimizing your site’s speed
Here’s a step-by-step guide as to what our team has done to achieve a score of 100 out of 100 with the Google PageSpeed Insights tool. Our starting point was 75 out of 100 for mobile interface and 87 out of 100 for the desktop interface. Keep in mind that this is personalized. Every website is built differently and might need different alterations.
The first thing we did was:
- Minify HTML, CSS and JS
- Optimize images
- Reduce server response time;
- Eliminate render-blocking CSS in above-the-fold content
- Leverage browser caching