Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool can be very useful for measuring and improving your site speeds, page loading times, SEO, and conversion rates. Your Page Speed Score is an overall analysis of how quickly your page loads – and it works to analyze its loading time both on mobile devices and desktop devices.
Faster loading times lead directly to higher conversion rates – while slow pages lead to a higher bounce rate. A Google PageSpeed Insights score of 85 or higher is typically considered to be good – this means that your web page will load quickly on both mobile and desktop.
But what if your score is lower? How can you improve your website speed, reduce web page load time, and ensure that visitors to your website don’t leave due to long loading times? Find out now in this blog from Australian Internet Advertising.
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1. Implement Web Page Compression
GZIP compression is a great option for anyone who wants to reduce the overall size of their web pages and speed up page loading times. How it works is pretty complex, but let’s break it down.
Basically, GZIP compression allows your server to send a compressed, smaller version of your website to a user’s device. Then, the user’s device unpacks the page and it opens on their device – just like a normal website would.
The primary benefit here is that by compressing the contents of a webpage, you can reduce its size quite a bit – often by up to 75% or more in size. The size of image files, text, and other elements will be reduced when the information is sent to the user.
The overall server response time will be shorter, too – since less data must be sent from the server to the user. This adds up to a better Google PageSpeed Score.
2. Minify CSS, HTML & JavaScript Code
Code “minification” is an important step to take to minimize page loading times. This refers to looking through the code of the website, and removing any unnecessary or redundant data from the code.
Minification also can involve stripping away spaces and other unnecessary formatting from your website’s code, which also helps improve page loading times. A lot of different tools exist to minify your code automatically.
You may also want to consider using Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) to create your pages, specifically if you reach a lot of mobile users. This framework helps dramatically simplify and speed up web pages for mobile-first optimization using special HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code, allowing pages to load in just fractions of a second.
3. Focus On Above-The-Fold Content
“Above-the-fold” means the content that’s initially visible when someone visits a web page – before they scroll down to reach more content on your website.
You need to make sure that above-the-fold content loads quickly. This is because once the above-the-fold content loads, the user can see it and start interacting with the page – and the content “below the fold” can continue to load in the background.
Even if it takes several seconds for the entire page to load, if the above-the-fold content loads quickly, you’ll enjoy a better Google PageSpeed score, faster loading times, and better conversion rates.
4. Improve Server Response Time
Server response time is absolutely essential for fast page loading speeds. Google recommends that your server response time be less than 200ms for the best user experience.
This means that the servers that you use to host your website must be fast, reliable, and responsive, and deliver content to your users as quickly as possible.
There are a lot of different things that can slow down server response times – such as slow traffic routing, improper frameworks and libraries, insufficient memory and CPU resources, and other such factors.
So, how do you speed up server response time? Choose a better web hosting service. Often, new entrepreneurs choose cheap website hosting providers that don’t offer the bandwidth and computing resources they need to build a reliable, high-quality website.
Trying to build a fast website without high-quality servers is like trying to put a Ferrari engine into a Honda Civic. It just won’t work right.
So make sure that you do your research and find a web hosting provider that will give you the performance, reliability, and fast loading times that you need for your website.
5. Eliminate Or Optimize Large Images
Images are one of the most common causes of poor website speed and performance. According to Google, graphical elements including icons, product images, logos, hero images, and other such images can easily comprise up to 2/3 of a page’s loading “weight” – the resources required to load a webpage.
There are two basic steps you can take to help reduce the load of images on your website and minimize loading time.
Optimize images
The first thing you should do is make sure you optimize your images by converting them to a compressed format, like .JPG instead of using a “lossless” format like .PNG.
Converting an image from a .PNG to a .JPG, for example, can reduce its size by up to 90%. The quality of the image will be slightly lower after the image is converted, but users won’t notice this. What they will notice is a much faster page loading time!
You can convert your own images as you upload them to your website, but there are lots of tools that can do it for you automatically. For example, there are a lot of WordPress plugins that will automatically convert and shrink uploaded images, simplifying the process of optimizing images and making it easy to optimize your website.
Reduce total number of images
Do you really need all of the images on your website? In some cases, less may be more! Fewer images mean shorter page loading times, so if you are able to eliminate some of the images from your web page without reducing its impact or value, this may be a good option.
Look over a few of your web pages. Are there logos, images, and icons you could do without? If so, removing them could be the right move.
6. Use Browser Caching To Speed Up Performance
Browser caching allows you to speed up the performance of a web page by storing some of its assets locally on the user’s device, like a computer or cell phone. This improves the overall speed of the website – particularly after the user has visited it once.
The way it works is pretty simple to understand. When caching is enabled, the web server sends your information to their device, and it’s then “remembered” by their web browser, which can load some of your website’s assets directly from their device.
For example, this may include the header of your website, your navigation, your logo, and other images and elements. When caching is enabled, these will be saved to the user’s device – and “cached” for later use.
Then, when the user visits your website again, the browser will know to retrieve the cached assets from the local device – and it will not have to make as many requests to your server for new information.
Fewer requests mean the page will load faster, so caching is one of the best ways to reduce the number of elements that must be loaded by the user, and to speed up overall page loading time.
Google usually recommends a caching policy of at least one week, but longer caching policies may be used for design elements that largely go unchanged. This process can be easily set up and automated with tools like W3 Total Cache.
7. Avoid Redirects & Use A Responsive Design
This is mostly a problem with older websites that don’t use “responsive” design to work on devices of all types like phones, tablets, desktops, and laptops – and instead use a mobile version of their website.
If a user visits a website on a mobile device and is redirected to a mobile version of the web page, this means that more server resources will be used to send them to the mobile website. Each redirect causes page rendering to halt and restart, which leads to a very slow mobile experience.
Mobile websites have usability issues, too. They usually just don’t work as well as modern responsive websites. This, along with long loading times, leads to poor conversion rates – and a bad Google PageSpeed score.
Follow These Tips For A Better Google PageSpeed Score And Higher Conversions!
We hope this guide from Australian Internet Advertising has been helpful. We’re experts in SEO and modern web design, and by following our advice, you can raise your Google PageSpeed score and bring in more customers.
Need help? Guidance? More information? We’re here for you. Contact us online or give us a call at 1300 304 640 to schedule a consultation, and see how our team of designers and SEO specialists can set your business up for success.
