What is Page Speed Insights, and how to use them?

When you optimize your website, several factors contribute to its performance in search engine results pages (SERPs). However, the biggest one is page speed. Google has a good tool called Page Speed Insights in Google that can help you measure your website’s loading time and identify the problem areas that are slowing it down. This article will tell you how to use Page Speed Insights and what to do about any issues it finds so you can start ranking higher.

‍

About Google PageSpeed Insights

‍

Google Pagespeed Insights is an excellent tool for analyzing your website speed and providing optimization tips. There are four key areas of optimization that Google Pagespeed Insights will evaluate on your site- HTML, CSS, Images, and Overall Performance. We recommend optimizing one area at a time for the best results. Once you have completed the recommended optimizations for each of these areas, we encourage you to repeat the test with Google Pagespeed Insight to see if there have been any improvements in site performance or accessibility. For example, after making your images responsive and lazy loading them with tools like WPOptimize, Bootstrap Lazy Loader, or Imagify - run a test on the changes with Google PageSpeed insights and see if image load times have improved. If they have not improved, it might be worth looking into other optimization methods, such as changing the size and type of images used on your site. A few good rules of thumb include:

‍

• Use JPEGs instead of PNGs for photos and screenshots;
• Use GIFs instead of PNGs when animation isn't necessary;
• When using larger files, compress them as much as possible without affecting quality. One can use ImageOptim (for Mac) or TinyPNG (online) to reduce file sizes without losing quality.
• Minimize HTTP requests by combining multiple assets into as few files as possible; and
• Remove all unnecessary white space from HTML code, which reduces download time. You can do this manually or use a plugin like WP Beautifier or Code Poet.

‍

How to measure Google PageSpeed Insights

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and helpful. Therefore, they need their search engine indexing pages across the Web as quickly as possible. The more your site can help them with this, the better off you'll be. As such, Google created PageSpeed Insights - a tool that measures a site's performance on HTML size, script efficiency, server response time, and other essential factors. It then assigns a score of 0-100, which tells you how well your site is optimized for speed.

‍

Google isn't the only one who cares about speedy sites - many people have become accustomed to fast-loading sites and may not even consider visiting yours if it takes too long to load.

‍

If there are areas in which your website needs improvement, 

‍

• Click on the Help Improve Site Performance button at the bottom of the page, and it will recommend fixes based on issues identified by PageSpeed Insights. 

‍

Once you've followed these steps to improve site performance, run PageSpeed Insights again to see if further optimization is needed. For example, if Google's previous recommendations successfully reduced the size of your HTML file or improved your CSS delivery, those aspects won't appear in subsequent reviews. 

‍

You might also find that fixing one issue led to another being revealed, so running PageSpeed Insights periodically is always a good idea. You want to aim for an overall rating of 80 or higher. That way, visitors can get what they're looking for quickly without having to wait around for your site to load too long. 

‍

How to Improve Google PageSpeed Insights?
‍

There are several ways to optimize your website. All the tips in this post will help you increase the speed of your website and have a better Google PageSpeed score.

• One of the first things you should do is avoid using scripts that don't need JavaScript or as much JavaScript as possible. You should also reduce requests from around 100 to 50 and use caching mechanisms. You can also increase server response time for Ajax requests by storing pre-rendered HTML content or sending rendered HTML instead of only a script tag (also known as pre-rendering). 
• By loading images at a lower resolution, so they load faster. Use Photoshop's Save For Web option or TinyPNG to compress photos without losing quality. Reduce the number of plugins on your website and choose lightweight plugins. Decrease redirects by editing your .htaccess file to keep track of 404 errors and set up 301 redirects when you change a URL structure. 
• Finally, if any service takes more than eight seconds to load on mobile devices, try reducing it or removing it completely because this could slow down your website's overall performance. When updating these services, test them before making them live. 

‍

By following these steps, you'll see an improvement in your Google PageSpeed score over time!

‍

Conclusion

Website performance is important for both website owners and users. Not only does it affect your site's rankings in search engine results pages, but page speed also affects the user experience of your website. Here's how to get started with Google Page Speed Insights and use them to improve your website performance. 

• Sign into Google Analytics. 
• Click on Website Performance in the menu panel. 

In the Performance subpanel, you'll see a summary of your website's performance from Google Page Speed Insights. You can view more detailed reports by clicking the links at the top. If you have time, we recommend reading through all these reports as they contain valuable information that will help you decide what changes to make to your website to perform better. Remember that some changes may take time or money to implement, and others will take just a few minutes or no cost!