We all know that Google Pagespeed Insights is one of the most powerful tools to measure your site’s performance. Also it provides some tips to improve your website’s speed for desktop and mobile devices. But how to get a 100/100 score (or at least something close to that) if your site uses a complex content management system, like WordPress? Let’s find it out.
What is Google Pagespeed Insights?
Before we jump into improving our site speed, let’s quickly talk about Google Pagespeed Insights as a tool and find out what exactly it shows.
Google Pagespeed Insights (GPI) – is a free online tool developed by Google that shows an aggregated score of your site’s load speed, its overall performance and suggests all the ways to improve it.
GPI is based on the Lighthouse. It’s an open-source instrument that audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO and more. And it is built into your Google Chrome browser.
Why Is It Important to Have a High GPI Rate?
First of all we have to admit that if you have a WordPress site that uses several powerful plugins it will be close to impossible to get a perfect rank.
And in fact you should not be obsessed with the idea of a 100 score.
GPI developers offer to think of it as a tool that shows you the most problematic spots.
But it is still important to increase your Google Pagespeed Insights rate and keep it high. Here are some reasons.
1) Your page speed is a ranking factor for Google. So, there is a strong correlation between your score and your position in Google Search Results.
2) Too long wait time increases the probability that the visitor will leave your site.
3) Google has another interesting tool called Revenue Impact Calculator. It shows how much additional revenue you can get by simply improving your site’s page speed.
In this particular example you can see that by decreasing the load time from 2.6s till 1.6s you can get a 50% increase in revenue.
So, as we can see your site speed is even more important that one may think.
Ways to Get Higher Google Pagespeed Insights Results
There are plenty of things that you can do to improve your Google Pagespeed Insights score.
- Start with optimizing your images on the page. It is wise to use modern formats of images, like webp and jpg, instead of png.
Also, make sure that the image size is not larger than you need. If for example you are using WordPress and the content area of your blog post is just 900px there is no sense to upload wider images. And the same with the sidebar. If it is just 400px wide don’t use images wider than 400px. They will simply slow down your site.
- Use a caching plugin. If you use WordPress there is a wide variety of caching plugins. W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket, WP Super Cache to name a few.
Each of these plugins create temporary static files that are loaded much faster than dynamically generated pages by WordPress. So, instead of going through the entire page generation process the visitor receives a static premade page.
- Turn off things that you don’t need. When you use WordPress and upload a premium WordPress theme it automatically offers to install plenty of recommended plugins. But the truth is that you will be barely using even 20% of all that. So, make sure to deactivate all the plugins and templates that you don’t use. They may slow down your site.
- Minify scripts. It is a more technical thing, but it is kinda important one. Do your best to minify your CSS, HTML and JavaScript code. There are several powerful online tools, like HTML minifier, CSSNano and Closure Compiler that can help you with that. Their main goal is to make the size of your code files as small as it is possible, while not braking the page itself.
- Use a productive web hosting. If you want to get the highest possible Google Pagespeed Insights score you need to host your site on a good server. Shared web hosting will most likely slow down your site, while dedicated VPS hosting will make it faster. BlueHost, HyperHost, and Siteground can offer pretty good options.
- Use CloudFlare. Another important factor is the distance between your visitor and the server. CloudFlare is the online service that increases your site’s security and helps to load the site faster for the visitors located far away from your server location.
As an alternative option check the service provided by ThemeREX Studio: Website Speed Optimization. In case you want to save your time and have professionals do it for you, go ahead and apply.
Getting 100/100 Google Pagespeed Insights Score with Nitropack
But what if you want to get a perfect 100/100 GPI score with the minimal time and money investments?
In this case consider getting a NitroPack service.
This online service boosts a PageSpeed score and reduces load time drastically. Basically it does everything that the GPI suggests in the inspection results.
- Smart caching.
- Image compression and lazy load.
- Scripts load optimization.
- Provides a global CDN.
- Preloading critical scripts.
- Using special speed algorithms.
- etc.
Here is the link to their site. They offer some premade solutions for WordPress, WooCommerce, OpenCart and Magento.
The pricing is quite affordable. For example, if you have a small site with up to 5K views per month you can go with their free package. Though it may be a bit costly for the sites with the traffic over 1 mln pageviews. Here is their full pricing table.
And here is the real example of increasing GPI score within 10 minutes using a NitroPack service.
Before:
After:
If you are curious how it works live check this quick video by WPLearningLab.
Wrap Up
In this article we talked about the site speed, its importance and how to improve your Google PageSpeed Insights score.
There are different reasons why one should care about the site’s performance. Luckily there are several free and paid solutions that can help you to get better results for your website and therefore for your business overall.
Share your thoughts about this topic. What is your experience with optimizing your site speed and using tools mentioned in the article?
