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This is what you can expect in our detailed article about PageSpeed Insights 😉
What is Google PageSpeed Insights?
Why is PageSpeed Insights used for?
What metrics does PageSpeed Insights measure?
How can the user experience on your website be improved?
How can you use PageSpeed Insights for your business?
Advantages and disadvantages of PSI
What is the difference between lab and field data?
General recommendations and tips
Common tools for improving PageSpeed
FAQs
Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a free tool from Google that analyses and evaluates the performance of your website. It has been continuously developed and improved since its first launch in 2011. It measures the loading speed and behaviour of your site on both mobile devices and desktops and provides concrete suggestions for improvement. PSI combines field data from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) and lab data generated by automated tests with Lighthouse.
In addition, the page structure is analysed with regard to accessibility, best practices and SEO .
In addition to the Pagespeed Online tool, there is also a public Pagespeed Insights API that can be used in your own tools / plugins.
PageSpeed, i.e. the speed at which your website loads, has long since become an important quality criterion. Even though it was not initially considered a ranking factor, page load time has always played an important role in terms of user experience. For this reason, Google declared PageSpeed an official ranking factor for desktops in April 2010, and since July 2018, this has also applied to mobile devices.
Companies and webmasters use the tool to check the loading times of their websites and identify optimisation potential. A fast PageSpeed score can improve the user experience, reduce the bounce rate and increase the conversion rate. In addition, factors such as loading speed, accessibility or the structure of a website also influence the ranking in search engine results.
In addition to the core web vitals Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction To Next Paint (INP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), other important metrics such as First Contentful Paint (FCP), Time To First Byte (TTFB), First Input Delay (FID), Speed Index (SI) or Total Blocking Time (TBT) are also used to evaluate performance.
As a rough rule of thumb, a website should load in less than three seconds to keep users reasonably satisfied. Clearly, the shorter the better! But that’s easier said than done. Some factors that slow down the loading of your website are difficult or impossible to influence. These include:
Bandwidth: If your website visitor is affected by low internet bandwidth, your page will also load more slowly. This is not due to poor PageSpeed optimization, but often to poor network coverage or, less commonly, the user’s slow DSL connection.
Browser cache: If a user’s cache has not been cleared for a long time, this will also affect the loading time of your page. However, how often a user clears their cache is beyond your control, which is why page loading can be significantly delayed if the cache is full.
User’s computing power: Older PCs or smartphones also affect page loading speed. This is often due to insufficient RAM or low processor performance.
The user experience is influenced by several factors that go far beyond pure loading times. PageSpeed is a central component of this, but structure, design, and interaction also play an important role. The most important measures for improving the user experience include:
Pagespeed is equally relevant for visitors and search engines. If a website loads only with delays, this has an impact on the crawler. Because slow loading pages are also crawled slower. This means that the crawling budget is used up more quickly and not as many pages can be indexed as is the case with fast pages. The loading time of a page is therefore one of the Google ranking factors since 2010, which are decisive for the position in the SERPs on which your page is displayed. Since mobile searches in particular are becoming more and more frequent, Google introduced page load speed as a ranking factor for mobile websites as well in July 2018.
If you want to achieve a lot of organic reach through good positioning, you must consequently focus on an optimized page load speed.
Enter the URL of your website in PageSpeed Insights to get an overview of the current performance.
The analysis provides a score between 0 and 100.
A value between 90 and 100 is rated as fast, between 50 and 89 as average and below 50 as slow.
PageSpeed Insights reports highlight specific areas that can be improved. Typical weaknesses include:
Performance
Accessibility
Best practices
SEO
The specific weightings of the performance metrics are not visible in the Lighthouse report itself, but can be simulated in the “Lighthouse Scoring Calculator“. You can use this tool to calculate the PageSpeed score based on your own data.
Depending on the CMS/system, some improvements can be realised via plugins or extensions (system-dependent). Some must or can be implemented on the server or code side.
WordPress, for example, offers numerous plugins for caching or image optimisation, whereas a server response time or unnecessary CSS / JS should be changed with human intelligence in the server configuration or the code.
Whether and with what effort these suggestions can be implemented depends primarily on the system used.
Check the effect of your optimisation measures and focus on the lab data, as changes in the field data do not have an immediate effect.
If technically feasible, optimisation measures should be tried out in a test system before publication.
After implementing the optimisations, you should regularly monitor the performance of your website to ensure that the improvements are sustainable. Continuous monitoring also helps to recognise and rectify new weak points at an early stage, e.g. when new pages are added, pages are changed, new libraries are used, etc.
You can find a more detailed description of performance, structure, etc. at https://web.dev/learn/
WordPress | WP Rocket: A powerful caching plugin that improves loading times through browser caching, page caching and JavaScript execution delay. W3 Total Cache: A comprehensive caching plugin that offers database caching, object caching and browser caching. Autoptimize: Optimises performance by minimising and merging CSS and JavaScript files. |
Joomla | JCH Optimize: A plugin that combines and minimises CSS and JavaScript files to improve loading times. Cache Cleaner: Improves performance by efficiently managing caching and optimising the database. |
Drupal | Boost: Caching module that creates static HTML pages for anonymous users and reduces server load. AdvAgg (Advanced Aggregation): Optimises CSS and JavaScript files through minimisation and aggregation. |
Magento | Full Page Cache Warmer: A module that manages caching for full pages and improves load times for returning visitors. Nitrogento: Optimises performance through efficient caching and minimisation of database queries. |
Shopify | Booster: A plugin that improves performance by optimising images and minimising JavaScript and CSS files. Plug in Speed: A tool for optimising page loading speed through various techniques such as image compression and lazy loading. |
Table 1: Tools for improving PageSpeed
The PageSpeed score is a rating scale from 0 to 100 that evaluates the performance of a website based on various metrics. A higher score indicates better performance.
PageSpeed Insights are important for SEO because the loading speed of a website is a ranking factor for Google. Faster websites offer a better user experience and can lead to higher rankings in the search results. In addition, topics such as accessibility and structural SEO are becoming increasingly important.
It is recommended to check the website regularly, ideally monthly, with PageSpeed Insights to ensure that performance is continuously optimised. It is also advisable to check after technical changes.
If your website has a low score, you should implement the optimisations suggested by PageSpeed Insights, such as image optimisation, code minimisation and implementation of caching strategies.
Yes, external resources such as third-party scripts and embedded content can affect load times and therefore impact the PageSpeed Insights score. Optimise or remove these resources to improve performance.
The Core Web Vitals are specific metrics that Google classifies as critical to the user experience. These include LCP, INP (formerly First Input Delay FID) and CLS.
Yes, many of the optimisations suggested by PageSpeed Insights do not require deep technical knowledge and can be implemented using plugins or simple tweaks.
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