When designing your website, you prioritize according to what you feel matters most. You invest your energy into creating the perfect design, making the website easily navigated, or entertaining and fun.
With your target audience in mind, you make decisions and compose it to ensure it fits their needs. However, there’s one thing every target audience in the world has in common.
They demand speed.
The probability of bounce increases by 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds.Google SOASTA report, 2017)
Your website’s loading speed is a crucial factor in your bounce rate percentage. Most web users are impatient and won’t tolerate slow website. To learn about your website’s speed and make necessary improvements, you can use Google PageSpeed Insights.
Let’s break it down and see how this tool can help you optimize your website.
- What is Google PageSpeed Insights?
First things first, let’s clarify what exactly is this tool and what’s its main purpose.
Google PageSpeed Insight (PSI) is a tool designed to help you optimize your webpages on all devices and make them faster.
It creates a separate diagnostics for:
- desktop devices
- mobile devices
It runs the necessary diagnostics and gives you a score of your page’s overall speed.
Then, it tells you exactly what needs optimization and you can handle it.
By giving your webpage a score from 0 to 100, the tool will let you know exactly where you stand.
The score of 85 is considered to be good. But, do you want to settle for “good”?
Let’s see what is it that you can do to improve your result and optimize your webpage using this tool.
- What to do to Fix Your Result?
Once you paste your website’s URL to PageSpeed Insights and get the results of its analysis, you need to make some moves.
Make sure you go through all the red and yellow alerts and see what’s making your website slow.
In addition, read the points checked with a green mark to learn about the thing’s you’ve already got covered, which are making your website faster.
Now, let’s take a look at some of the most common issues slowing your website down, and what you need to do to fix them immediately.
- Most Common Issues and How to Fix Them
If your PageSpeed Insight score is lower than you’d want it to be, chances are you’re facing some of the issues we’re about to break down.
Read through all of them to learn how to eliminate them and use this tool to optimize your page.
Resize Your Images
Every website has a certain number of images uploaded, to make the website more user-friendly, appealing, or interesting.
However, images can often be the reason why your website is running slow and why it takes so much time to upload.
If PageSpeed Insight alerts you about the size of your images, here’s what you need to do:
- review the images uploaded on your website
- resize them using a compression tool or plugin
- compress all your future images to avoid going back to your old low score
Once your images are neatly compressed, you’ll notice a significant improvement in your score and loading speed.
In addition, consider lazy-loading of images, to the moment they’re actually needed on-screen. This can additionally contribute to the entire process.
Employ Browser Caching
Another thing you’ll most likely be warned about is the cache policy of your website.
Each time when a browser loads a webpage, a process of downloading web files happens in the background. The browser needs to downloads all the files necessary for properly displaying the webpage:
- HTML
- images
- CSS
- JavaScript
This process slows down the whole process and has a negative impact on your score.
However, browser caching can help you reduce or eliminate this problem:
- it stores the files in the user’s browser
- once they re-enter the website they’ve already got them downloaded
- the website loads faster
Find a cashing plugin to optimize your website and make it faster.
Remove Render Blocking
A JavaScript file may be preventing your page from loading quickly. This is a common problem you shouldn’t ignore.
To put it simply, instead of having your content upload first, JavaScript is taking the energy and the speed to do it first.
To stop this from happening, you need to stop the CSS and JavaScript resources from loading first.
Here’s how to do it:
- inline the script
- delay the scripts which are not crucial to the loading process
This way, you’re making sure your loading speed is increased and your bounce rate is significantly decreased.
Minify the Code
Another problem your PageSpeed Insight tool might warn you about is the space taken by your source codes.
Coding takes up a certain amount of space. If you manage to minify it, you’ll manage to speed up your loading time.
Minification is a process in which you remove or fix duplicated data such as:
- white spaces
- unused code
- repetitious formatting
- comments
- etc.
The three resources that require minification are:
- JS
- CSS
- HTML
There’s a tool or a plugin for each of these resources, which can help you minify them. Make sure to use them, and solve this problem as soon as possible.
Avoid Redirecting
Finally, we need to mention the redirecting process as a potential threat to your loading speed.
When your page takes too much time to load, it’s possible that there are redirecting patterns preventing it from working properly.
This happens when pages are redirected to different ones, optimized for certain devices.
So, how can you fix this?
There’s only one way:
- make sure you invest time and energy to build a responsive design, suitable for all devices
This way, there will be no need for redirecting and precious time would be saved from the loading process.
Conclusion
When you’re unsatisfied with your website’s loading speed, you need to take action and start fixing one problem at a time. Use Google PageSpeed Insights to learn about the burning issues, and understand what’s slowing you down. Then, start removing issue by issue.
Use the advice given above to guide you through the process of your website’s optimization and start working on it today.
