How to Improve Your Score on Page Speed Insights

The loading speed of your website is one of Google's most important ranking factors. In fact, it directly affects SEO and conversion rates.

Page Speed Insights is a free tool from Google capable of giving you a score based on the speed of your site.

The bounce rate, which is the percentage of users who enter and exit your site immediately after, is highly dependent on the web page loading speed (the page load). If this exceeds one second and goes up to 6, the bounce rate will increase uncontrollably!

How to get 100/100 on Page Speed Insights: useful tips

How does Page Speed Insights work?

This diagnostic tool for your website works thanks to the open-source program Lighthouse which generates test data and tests your site, then leading to an initial evaluation.

This then needs to be subjected to a thorough analysis with real data downloaded from the website that generates the final score ranging from 0 to 100.

Here, loading issues are analyzed for both desktop and mobile versions, bottlenecks that create conversion problems, and all the dynamics that can increase page abandonment and bounce rate.

How to improve your Page Speed Insights score

Having a score close to 80 is already an excellent result (both desktop and mobile); to achieve this result and perhaps do even better, here are some useful tips:

Image optimization: images are often a significant source of slowdown on websites. The issues related to images are definitely due to their size (if they exceed one MB, they are absolutely oversized!). When you make use of collaborators, whether external or not, pay close attention to how they insert images!

Improving Server Response Times: The server, whether virtual or dedicated, that you choose to host your website is a significant factor in improving your Page Speed Insights score, especially when you have a heavy portal or an e-commerce site with many products. Carefully consider the hosting where you set up the site and check the TTFB value (Time To First Byte).

Essentially, the server response time is that interval between when content starts loading and the server's ability to process it.

The factors that can influence this metric include:

• Database requests
• Slow path
• Framework
• Libraries
• CPU resource starvation
• Memory starvation

Minimize CSS, JavaScript, and HTML: The CSS stylesheets, JavaScripts, and even simple HTML code are elements that can weigh down a site over time. To avoid this, simply adopt the technique of minifying that is, removing excess data and simplifying these strings and codes as much as possible. 

Some excellent programs include:

• The HTML minifier for HTML;
• CSSNano and csso for CSS minification;
• UglifyJS2 and the Closure Compiler for JavaScript.

An excellent tool is also Google’s AMP, which optimizes web pages for near-instantaneous page loading!

Another very useful tip is to prioritize content above the fold!

This essentially means structuring a landing page or any website by including lots of information and many call to action in the upper part of the site.

This is important for two main reasons: first, from a user's perspective. Whoever reads the page will have a better perception of the page loading time. Technically, if you insert valuable content that is important for the user as well as for the site's conversion at the top, it will be loaded first by the browser, thus creating a perception of greater speed!

Elimination of render-blocking JavaScript: sometimes JavaScript blocks the loading process especially when using third-party scripts. To Avoid JavaScript render-blocking by adopting one of the following options:

• Many non-essential scripts can be deferred in various ways and fetched after the page has been properly executed.
• Prefer asynchronous scripts over synchronous ones that pause the loading process.

How to Speed up your website and achieve a great score on Page Speed Insights: Framework360

Framework360 gives you the possibility to obtain a very high score regarding the loading times of your website pages.

How? Simply by optimizing every aspect we have talked about so far.

The images are uploaded directly to the server with compression that limits their maximum size.

The server response is optimized to the fullest by leveraging AWS (Amazon Web Service), the best hosting available.

The code that the site is composed of is clean, linear, and fast, the result of years of experience and continuous improvements.

The platform will therefore give you the possibility to configure your site in a completely intuitive, personal way and above all efficient for search engines, without the need for any expertise in programming and website building.

Try now the speed of sites developed with Framework360!

In conclusion, we have seen that optimizing the website for Page Speed Insights is indeed one of the fundamental steps for creating an online environment, so as to continually improve the performance of one's site and avoid too high bounce rates.