Google’s PageSpeed Insights have had a little makeover. Not much has changed, but you’ll definitely see that things have changed a little. You now receive two scores, one for Page Speed and one for Optimisation. These two scores have replaced the solitary optimisation score that you once were awarded.
The speed score is based upon how quickly visitors to your site find your website to be. The faster the better, but there are some elements of site speed that are out of your control. For example, if someone is accessing your website from a slow device your score could be impacted. Therefore, it’s more important than ever to do all you can to make your website as fast as possible. The overall score is an average, so the more people you can serve quickly, the better.
Compress Your Content
Content compression helps to reduce the amount of time it takes for the resource to be downloaded. Enabling compression results in the page loading far quicker for the user as they don’t need a lot of data to access your content. It’s possible to use a variety of compression techniques for different elements of your site. However, we recommend first removing any resources that aren’t need and then using Gzip to compress everything that needs compressing.
Avoid Landing Page Redirects
Redirects cause an instant delay and you want to avoid these on all of your landing pages. Landing pages always need to be fast loading to stop impatient users from leaving before the content has had a chance to load. Ideally, redirects should be completely avoided, if that isn’t possible, at least make all landing pages accessible using only one redirect leading to the content on a responsive website.
Image Optimisation
Large image files are the cause of many slow loading websites. These images can be optimised in a way that won’t reduce their quality. There’s plenty of help out there offering tips on how to optimise your images, the main ones being:
- Use relative sizes for images
- All images must be responsive
- Use vector formats
- Don’t use metadata on the images
Find lots more detail and information for optimising GIF, PNG and JPEG images and all other types of image files by visiting Google’s Optimise Image insights.
Would you like help with Google Speed Optimisation tips for your website? We’re always on hand to start the conversation and see where we can take your site and your business with digital marketing and SEO. Contact us to find out more.
