5 tips for improving your score on the Google PageSpeed Insights tool

The load speed of your website has a knock-on effect to many areas of your website, for example; overall user experience, ad quality score, conversion rate, search engine rankings, and more.

Page speed is equally as important for desktop websites as it is for mobile/tablet versions of your website too. For instance, a mobile website that loads in five seconds earns up to 2x more mobile ad revenue than websites that take longer — up to 19 seconds.

Also, nearly 50% of visitors leave your website in an instant if it takes more than two to three seconds to load.

These stats really do highlight the importance of a fast loading website across all devices. SEO experts, developers, and webmasters are constantly looking for ways to improve the loading speed of their website because it can dramatically improve search engine rankings, conversion rate, and sales.

Thankfully, most of it can be done with the help of the Google PageSpeed Insights tool.

What is the Google PageSpeed Insights tool?

The Google PageSpeed Insight tool is a free application by Google that analyses your website content and generates actionable suggestions that can make that web page faster. It reports performance on both mobile and desktop devices.

A performance score is displayed at the top of the report, which summarises the performance of the web page you are testing. Generally, a score of less than 50 is considered to be slow. On the other hand, a score of 90+ is considered fast.

Here is a sample report:

How to increase your performance score

Now that we have discussed the importance of a fast loading website, Google PageSpeed Insights tool, and the performance score that it displays at the top of the report, it is time to discuss how you can improve that score.

There are many ways to do that. Following are a few of them:

1. Code minification

Minifying your website code can have a major impact on the loading speed of your website and, hence, the performance score in the Google PageSpeed Insights tool.

To understand, your website code must be compact. Unnecessary and redundant code must also be deleted.

Code minification leads to a faster and smaller server version of your file, which leads to improved speed and a better performance score.

You can use WordPress plugins like WP Super minify for code minification. To learn more about it, read what minification is.

2. Image optimisation

We all use images on our websites, and that’s good. Without images, web pages look boring, and the content seems uninteresting.

However, using images may also slow down your website.

That’s a problem that you can at least minimise with the help of image optimisation.

By compressing the size of the images (without compromising on quality), you can use more images without letting them slow down your website. You can either do it manually by using Adobe Photoshop and using a better image format (JPEG), or you can use a WordPress plugin, such as EWWW image optimizer or Smush it.

3. Displaying your content more strategically

Improving the performance score basically means providing a great user experience to your website visitors. This means displaying them relevant content as quickly and efficiently as possible.

You can improve your performance score by making the most relevant content available in the above-the-fold section, so the visitor won’t have to scroll down to see what they want. To make your web page load more efficiently, you should also create your HTML to load the above-the-fold content first before the rest of the elements on the page.

4. Compression

Compression is a simple but highly effective technique to increase the website loading speed and improve the performance score in the Google PageSpeed Insights tool report.

By using GZIP compression, you can simply compress files before sending them to your server. This allows you to increase the loading speed of your website.

5. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

If you are absolutely committed to providing the best and fastest mobile experience to your users, you should try Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

AMP pages are non-cluttered and stripped down versions of your web pages that are gaining popularity rapidly. With the AMP technology, the web pages are loaded almost instantly.

If you are interested in AMP, start with this guide. But before you jump to it, know that AMP has its own set of disadvantages at the moment.

Bottom line

The bottom line is that you will have to increase the loading speed of your website if you want to score better on the Google PageSpeed Insights tool.

However, how well your website performs and the user experience it offers are much more important than the performance score at the top of a report. Follow the above-mentioned tips, and you should see a noticeable improvement.