Speed is crucial when it comes to creating a website!
When it comes to creating a website optimized for conversion rates and search engines, speed is crucial.
If your website isn’t fast, visitors will bounce off faster than you can say “conversions”.
However, speeding up your website is no easy task.
The problem may lie in poorly written code, images or bulky page elements.
You need to solve these problems quickly, because Google will penalize your site if you don’t.
The faster your site loads, the lower the bounce rate.
If your site is fast, you’re more likely to be ranked by Google than slow sites that generate a high bounce rate.
Fortunately, Google offers the PageSpeed Insights tool to find out what you need to fix.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t give you the best instructions for getting your score to 100%.
Here’s how to get a perfect 100% score on Google’s PageSpeed Insights and why you need to do it!
Why page speed matters
Page speed is an essential factor in improving your website’s ranking in Google’s search engine results.
If your site isn’t on a par with the top 10 organic pages, you won’t rank on the first page.
So focusing on page speed is key to a successful business and a website that converts.
Backlinko recently conducted a study in which they analyzed over eleven million search engine results pages (SERPs) on Google.
They wanted to determine which factors were most common among sites ranked in the top 10 results.
Surprisingly, they found that page speed and ranking don’t seem to be correlated.
However, the average loading time of a site on the first page is 1.65 seconds, which is relatively fast.
Page speed report
However, Google maintains that page speed is important.
An entire update has even been devoted to the subject.
They found that as page load time increases, so does the risk of someone bouncing off your site.
Google page speed
This means that if your page takes 10 seconds to load, the likelihood of someone leaving your site before it even loads increases by more than 120%!
But according to a recent study of over 5 million sites, the average website takes 10.3 seconds to load completely on a desktop computer and 27.3 seconds on a cell phone.
This means that almost all of us are missing the mark when it comes to having a high-performance website.
In another study, BigCommerce found that conversion rates for e-commerce sites average between one and two percent.
Portent found that page speed can significantly increase conversion rates.
By reducing your speed to less than two seconds, you can increase traffic and revenues.
So what causes a page to load slowly?
The most common causes of slow pages are large images and poorly designed coding.
If you look at any website of the modern era, it’s probably filled to the tipping point with images.
If you don’t optimize your images, your pages can take up several megabytes of space.
Page size and weight are often measured in bytes of page weight.
In simple terms, page weight bytes indicate the total size of a web page measured in bytes.
Google’s benchmark data shows that best practice for page size or weight is under 500kb.
But then again, most of us don’t measure up.
We far exceed the recommended weight.
One of the concepts that struck me most in the Google report came from this short but powerful quote:
“Whatever the case, faster is better and less is more.”
Whatever your site’s performance, chances are you’ve got some serious room for improvement.
How do I use PageSpeed Insights?
Most sites run slowly because large images take up too much space.
But this isn’t always the case for all websites.
You need to know exactly what’s causing your site’s slowness before making the necessary changes to achieve a 100% score with PageSpeed Insights.
To get started, open the PageSpeed Insights tool and enter your website URL in the bar:
Click on “Analyze” and Google will run a quick test on your site.
The final report will tell you everything you need to know about your site and what may be affecting its performance.
Here’s what my report looks like:
The score is 87/100.
That’s not great.
But it’s not terrible either.
There’s almost always room for improvement.
My aim here is to get you to 100% by the end of this article, as we embark on this journey into page speed together.
Page speed optimization
This information tells me that the items in the “Possible Optimizations” list have a little less impact than those I’ve already optimized.
Clearly, you’ll need to take care of each item to reach 100% on Page Speed Insights.
Start with the highest-priority elements (we’ll come back to this later).
Next, we want to test our mobile site separately.
You can use the PageSpeed Insights mobile site tester, but Google has released an updated and more accurate version of this tool.
Mobile site speed test
This report will take Google a few minutes to run, but it will give you a detailed overview of your mobile site’s performance against industry standards.
It will even tell you how many visitors you could be losing due to lower page speed.
This is what my data looks like:
Mobile site speed test report
My loading time on mobile is four seconds.
Remember: The recommended loading time is three seconds or less.
This means that my speed does not comply with industry standards.
As a result, I’m losing up to 10% of my visitors simply because of poor speed performance!
Here’s what my mobile test looks like when I compare it to industry standards:
Comparison of page speed in the sector
Although I’m still in the best performers section, I’m not where I should be if I want to maximize my website’s efficiency or generate more traffic and conversions.
Scroll down and Google will give you an estimate of what your best fixes could do for your website.
Page speed overview How to improve page speed
Google says that with a few fixes, I could reduce my loading times by about three seconds.
That means I could potentially get my website loading in less than a second!
It’s incredible.
Believe me, to save 10% of your visitors or more, this is something you need to do.
Put your website through this mobile site test to get the data you need to fix your site.
