A Detailed Guide on Google PageSpeed Insights

As Google says, a site that takes over 7 seconds to load is 113% more likely to bounce; this creates a huge difference in user experience and further affects your ranking in search results.

Boosting your website speed and performance is crucial. Google has found a direct relationship between faster load times and higher conversion rates. Example: Just a seven-second reduction in the average loading time for mobile landing pages alone can create a 67% increase in conversions.

It is necessary to maintain the page load speed throughout your website and minimal bounce rate to enhance rankings and user satisfaction. This is where Google's PageSpeed Insights tool play a vital role.

It can help you in highlighting and patching up performance issues with your website to make sure it loads in no time and keeps visitors engaged.

This comprehensive guide on Google PageSpeed Insights will help you leverage it and recognize critical areas of optimization for better SERP performance.

What is Google PageSpeed Insights?

Google provide a free tool to analyze your website’s performance – PageSpeed Insights. This tool dive deep to monitor every major and minor detail, including page load time, responsiveness, and visual appearance.

The tool provides insights for both mobile and desktop devices to check whether your website is mobile-friendly or not. Moreover, you will get recommendations and suggestions to improve performance.

PageSpeed Insights does an analysis by comparing data from the lab and the field.

• Lab data provides a controlled environment to debug issues.
• Field data captures real-world user experiences.

These datasets provide an all-inclusive report of your website’s performance along with the necessary improvements.

Here is the outlook of PageSpeed Insights:

To utilize the PageSpeed Insights, you just need to enter your website’s URL and click “Analyze”. It will reflect a complete report of issues along with the necessary suggestions.

The overall score ranges from 0 to 100 on PageSpeed Insights, for 0 being the worst performance and 100 being the best. If your website achieves 90 or above then it is really impressive. If the performance score lies between 50 to 89 then your website is average. And if it scores less than 50 then it really needs improvement.

Why do Google PageSpeed Insights Matter?

Industry benchmarks from Google's PageSpeed show that the slower the site, the higher the bounce rates. If it takes longer than 3 seconds to load, it is assumed that half of your users will leave. The truth is that as loading time increases, bounce rate continues going up.

In fact, a recent study cited that desktop webpages take 87.84% longer to load than mobile pages, further emphasizing the importance of optimizing for speed on all devices.

Recently, Google added to its ranking signals Page Experience, another metric that amalgamates Core Web Vitals with other existing factors, like mobile friendliness and safe browsing. The Page Experience aims to evaluate, with respect to real users, how well a webpage is.

In other terms, this means Google is now considering the direct influence factors making up the user experience in website ranking.

Page speed is part of Page Experience, which affects how users will interact with content. A slow website invites increased bounces, frustration, and thus a terrible overall user experience.

Therefore, the optimization of your website for the sake of speed is very important if you want to improve your search engine ranks to provide a great visitor experience.

Understanding Google PageSpeed Insights

The PageSpeed Insight tool gives a detailed report for Core Web Vitals, Lighthouse lab data, opportunities, diagnostics, and passed audits from Google.

Color coding gives visual indication of the performance of different sections of your website within the PSI report, for example,

• Green: Good performance
• Yellow: Improvement needed
• Red: Poor performance

The following color-coding in this trend makes identification of areas that need attention and the prioritization of optimization efforts all that much easier.

Let's now go through what is contained in each section of this report.

1- Field Data: Core Web Vitals Assessment

PageSpeed Insights provides a detailed report on Core Web Vitals through real-world data from the Chrome UX Report. This includes three critical SEO metrics that are focused on website speed and load time.

• FCP, which is first contentful paint, focuses on the time taken by the first text or image appears on the page.
• LCP, largest contentful paint, which provides the time that largest text or image takes to load on the page.
• FID, the first input delay that measures the response time of your page on the very first user interaction.
• CLS, cumulative layout shift, represents the page's visual stability and measures how unexpected movement of content, such as a jump in layout or positioning, interferes with the user experience.

Most of the metrics from Core Web Vitals are measured in either seconds or milliseconds, but it counts CLS using a special formula. A good CLS score is considered to be less than 0.1 while above 0.25 is poor.

The field data in the PageSpeed Insights report reflects the last 28 days, with accompanying distribution bars to illustrate how performance has behaved over time.

2- Lab Data

In addition to field data, PageSpeed Insights also includes lab data generated by the Lighthouse API. Lighthouse measures Core Web Vitals and three additional metrics:

• Speed Index, which provides insights about how quickly images and other visual content appear.
• Time to Interactive is the metric to know how much time a page takes to become complete interactive for the users, including CTAs, images, texts and other elements.
• Total Blocking Time provides a cumulative time period during which the user can’t able to get any response from the browser.

Unlike field data, lab data metrics do not include distribution bars but are presented as simple timestamps or results from the lab test.

Tips to Enhance Pagespeed Insights Performance 

1- Avoid Landing Page Redirects

Redirects add unnecessary latency to your page load. Any redirect will have an extra HTTP request and response, potentially causing additional roundtrips for the page to load. This can notably impact slower networks.

Remove redirects on your site where possible to help optimize performance. Instead, try to link directly when possible or perform redirects on the server level to avoid the extra HTTP requests.

2- Enable Compression

PageSpeed Insights will flag your website if it does not serve its compressible resources using gzip compression. Gzip compression greatly reduces the data size exchanged between the client and the server.

All modern browsers support gzip compression, so there really is no reason not to enable it for your website. With Gzip compression on, resources download faster, your users use less data, and your pages take less time to render.

3- Improve Server Response Time

Your website will face issues in performance if it takes more than 200 milliseconds, as per PageSpeed Insights report. It means if the server is slow then users might not get timely response from your website to any action or input.

Though differences between measurements can occur, large fluctuations in server response time could indicate underlying performance issues. In conclusion, speed up your server configuration and optimize the time it takes to deliver the first HTML.

4- Leverage Browser Caching

PageSpeed Insights will also warn if your website does not set appropriate caching headers, or if the cache lifetime is too short. Fetching resources over the network is slow and expensive and involves multiple roundtrips between client and server that delay page rendering.

To improve performance, ensure that all of the server responses include appropriate caching headers that will allow the client to determine whether and when they are able to reuse previously fetched resources. This might reduce network traffic and improve page loading times.

5- Minify Resources (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript)

PageSpeed Insights will warn in reporting about resources that could be minified. Minifying resources means removing the useless or repeated data without affecting how the browser would process the resource.

For instance, code minification involves removing comments and formatting, unnecessary code, usage of shorter variable and function names, among others. By minifying resources, you are reducing download size for such resources and thus reducing page load time.

6- Optimize Images

PageSpeed Insights will flag your website if it sees that your images can be further compressed to reduce their file size without affecting their visual quality. In many cases, images take up a big percentage of a page's download size.

Optimizing images will allow the browser to download fewer bytes, freeing the bandwidth and speeding up how soon content starts to loads visibly on the screen.

7- Optimize CSS Delivery

PageSpeed Insights will warn if your site has any render-blocking external stylesheets, as sometimes these stylesheets can take longer to load, and page render time depends upon the browser that needs to process all style and layout information before it can render a display.

Minimize render-blocking stylesheets to get the best page load times. Consider loading stylesheets asynchronously or inlining your styles so that the browser can begin rendering your content without having to wait for the download of the stylesheets.

8- Prioritize Visible Content

PageSpeed Insights will give a red light to your website if it takes more network round trips to render the above-the-fold content.

In case the first data is greater than the congestion window (on average 14.6kB compressed), the browser will have to ask for more from the server, and it could take ages to load a page on networks with high latency, like most cellular networks.

Above-the-fold content should be optimized to reduce the amount of data in the initial payload. Round trips between browser and server should also be minimized to improve page load times.

9- Remove Render-blocking JavaScript

PageSpeed Insights will flag your website if it sees that your HTML references a blocking external JavaScript file in the above-the-fold portion of the page. Before the browser can render a page, it needs to construct the DOM tree - it does this by parsing the HTML markup.

When the parser encounters a script tag, it blocks and runs the script there and then before it can continue parsing the remainder of the HTML.

In particular this could be a serious problem for external scripts the browser may need to wait for the download of the script which may take several network roundtrips and delays to the time to first render.

If you have scripts in your head, which is not advised and will be discussed later on, move them to the bottom of your page for better page loading performance.

Or use async loading techniques that will allow the browser to start rendering your content before all the scripts are downloaded.

Track Web Page Performance with RanksPro

Among other things, Google PageSpeed Insights is a very valuable tool for website owners and developers looking at improving the performance and search engine ranking of their websites.

By grasping the key metrics and recommendations provided, you will be able to identify what can be optimized and follow concrete steps toward making your website faster and more user-friendly.

While Google PageSpeed Insights does give important insights into recommendations that one should make to their website, it is always painful and a bit cumbersome to actually apply those suggestions. That is where the game-changing ability of RanksPro could come in.

It helps them indirectly by giving valuable data and insight that will aid in enhancing the website's speed in the following ways:

• Keyword Ranking: Since it tracks your keyword ranking, you are able to identify which keywords drive traffic to your site. You can then enhance the speed of these pages and offer an improved user experience.
• Organic Traffic: You can gauge organic traffic to find out what pages your audience is landing on the most. Based on that, you can further give more priority to the speed optimization of such pages so that they perform better.
• Backlinks: By studying your backlink profile, you'll discover how strong links link back to you. You can take further steps in optimizing such pages for speed to enhance their performance and user experience.
• On-page SEO: RanksPro will help you optimize on-page SEO elements of your website, including title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags. All these could very well affect your website ranking in search engines. Moreover, the optimization of these elements will probably serve to improve the speed of your website, too.

With RanksPro and its strong features, it automates many tedious tasks involved in improving website speed and SEO, which in turn increases traffic and conversions.