The goal of Google and other search engines is to return the best and most relevant search results to users.
Google analyzes over 200 factors when determining where a search result should rank in its index. In 2016 PageSpeed and user friendliness are two important factors that Google takes into consideration.
Improving your website’s PageSpeed should always be on your to-do list. It is an on-going optimization task that your website will need over time as you develop new site features and add new content.
That said, there are a number of tools and practices that you can implement to make this process manageable and the results worthwhile.
Let’s look at 5 of the most efficient and effective tools and methods that we can use to improve our website’s PageSpeed.
Test your site metrics and record your benchmarks
Before you start making any changes to your website, you need to know where your PageSpeed stands. This way, as you make changes you can measure the results and revert any changes that don’t make a positive impact.
Here are 3 free tools that you can use to measure your PageSpeed benchmarks:
Each of these tools will provide a letter grade (A – F) as well as a numerical score (0 – 100) for various components of your site that you can optimize.
With this information in hand, now you know where your site needs work and you have metrics to measure your efforts against.
Reduce Image File Size by Compressing Images
When using the tools above, you will notice a “waterfall” diagram of how your page loads. Basically, this is a diagram showing a long list of every single individual file that makes up one of your web pages in the order it is loaded and how long it takes to load.
It looks like this:
You can see that your web pages often times load multiple images, and for some of your blog posts, or other content-heavy pages, maybe even 50+ images.
It is optimal to compress all of the images on your website. This doesn’t affect image quality but it reduces the file size of the images making them load faster and increasing your PageSpeed.
There are a number of ways to compress your website images, here are a few of the most common:
- Photoshop – when you save the image, choose “save for web devices”
- WordPress Plugin – WP Smush or EWWW
- Drupal Module – Image Optimize
There are also web services that you can upload image files too for compression and optimization.
Combine Files That Go to Static Resources
Websites are made up of dynamic (changing) and static (unchanging) file types.
It is best to combine your unchanging file types like CSS and JS scripts into single files rather than multiple files.
The reason this is optimal is because, for each file that requires loading, a request is sent to your server. Imagine this like a food order at a restaurant counter, it will require the time and attention of one employee. There are a limited number of employees just as there are limited resources on your server.
So, it is best to send as few requests as possible to your server when loading a web page. Combining your static resource files will do just that, combine a few to a dozen or more files into 1, significantly reducing the number of requests sent to your server to load a web page.
- Combining CSS and JS files can be as simple as copying and pasting the contents of all of your JS files into one JS file and doing the same with your CSS files.
- There are multiple WordPress plugins and Drupal modules as well that can help you with this.
Once you have combined your CSS and JS files, you are ready to optimize them by “minifying” them.
Minify Your Files for Reduced File Size
Your CSS and JS files come standard with tons of extra spacing, commenting, and additional formatting that is meant for human eyes to read.
This is great for the developers coding these files However, it bloats the files making them larger than necessary for the web servers that serve them.
To avoid this, you can minify your JS and CSS files which simply strips the files of extra spaces, comments, and additional formatting in the files that are extra weight on the server.
Manually going through and minifying your files would be a huge pain. There are services that will minify files for you:
Just paste in your code and it will output the minified version for you. You can also look into plugins or modules for your sites if you are using WordPress or Drupal.
Implement Browser Caching
All browsers include an HTTP cache where files from web pages can be stored. This way when a visitor comes to your website and loads a page, certain files can be stored in their cache that will need to be loaded again as they visit other pages on your website.
When the files are served from the cache, rather than the server, it reduces requests and resources on your server, increasing your site’s PageSpeed.
Implementing caching for your website can greatly improve your PageSpeed and SEO and is considered a best practice. You can adjust your cache settings to cache various types of files etc depending on your website and server configuration.
Additional Learning & Resources on PageSpeed & SEO
Taking the time to implement the 5 methods above will have a great impact on your PageSpeed thus improving your SEO and site usability.
Anything you can do to make your website better for your visitors and search engines is always a win. To help you get started working on implementing these 5 methods, here are 5 additional PageSpeed optimization resources:
- Best SEO Plugins for WordPress Users: This tool has a search and filter function and allows you to quickly sort the best SEO plugins for a WordPress site. You can find plugins in this list to help combine, minify, and cache files. There are also additional plugins that will help improve your PageSpeed score like a plugin to Remove Query Strings from Static Resources.
- PageSpeed Tool + Optimization Guide: This tool can be used for any type of website, not just WordPress. Enter your URL to gather data on your site along with actionable tips for areas that need to be optimized and how you can go about optimizing them.
- Google’s PageSpeed FAQ: Google has published this FAQ to help webmasters with a variety of server related and CMS related questions.
- How to Achieve a 100/100 PageSpeed Score: This is an in-depth guide showing how an SEO achieved a perfect 100 score using Google’s PageSpeed insights tool. There are lots of great tips in here that you can apply to your optimization efforts.
Alright, now you’ve got the knowledge and the tools to optimize your website’s PageSpeed. Time to roll up those sleeves and get to optimizing!
Good luck improving your PageSpeed scores! If you have any questions about PageSpeed, just leave a comment below right now.