Google is important, we just have to face that fact. The Google PageSpeed score is also important, if you want to make sure that you rank better than your competitors, it’s important to have at least a decent PageSpeed score.
The key here is the mobile score. Sadly Google PageSpeed measures this using what is equivalent of an old 3G mobile connection, so the actual speed will be better live when most connections are 4G or better. Thankfully.
Tips to improve your Google PageSpeed Insights Score
- Use high quality hosting
- Use a caching plugin
- Use a CDN
- Optimize images
Use High Quality Hosting
High Quality hosting is key to a fast loading website. Don’t go for the cheapest solution obviously, although some are ok, and offer good service and speed. Go for a WordPress optimized hosting service. There are many to choose from, my favorite is Kinsta.com, they offer amazing 24 hour chat support, as well as utilizing Google’s Cloud Network for their hosting. They have data centers all over the world so you can choose the one closest to your customers.
Fast hosting is all about TTFB Time to first byte, the lower the better. And of course high speed processing of your website without lag, so make sure you have plenty of CPU available.
SiteWhiz.co offers managed WordPress hosting for your site, and yes we use Kinsta 🙂
Use a Caching Plugin to speed up your site
A caching plugin is also a great idea to use. This will serve your website as static files, instead of dynamically loading the entire site each time from the hosting server. Setting up the caching plugin can be a hassle, but my favorite one is WP Rocket, which is pretty straightforward.
Activate the caching obviously 🙂
Under File optimization activate Minify HTML, Minify CSS, and Minify Javascript
Activate Optimize CSS delievery (Load CSS async), Load Javascript Deferred, and test the setting delay Javascript Execution, but remember to test your site afterwards.
Under Media activate lazyloading.
This should increase your loading times and PageSpeed score significantly.
Use a CDN
A CDN is a Content Delievery Network. Basically it’s a lot of servers around the world serving your files to the user from where it’s closets. Say the server is located in Europe, and you visit the site from the USA. The CDN will make use of it’s USA location to serve you the files from that location, minimizing the time it takes to request them.
One of the best is Cloudflare, but also WP Rocket has it’s own RocketCDN. If your on Kinsta.com hosting, they already set you up with Cloudflare through their service.
Optimize Images
Optimzing images is also key to a fast site. If you upload 2000px+ images and load these on mobile as well, we need to have a little chat about best practices. No reason to load an image larger than the actual device viewing it on.
Use a service like Imagify (works well with WP Rocket) to optimize your images, it will go through all of them and reduce the maximum size of images, as well as removing unwanted information, to reduce the file size dramatically. It can also generate webp images, which Google loves and it will increase your loading times and Google Page Speed Score.
When adding images to a site make sure it’s not larger than needed.
These are just some of the tips you can use to optimize your site.
Need help with more, contact us and we’ll be happy to check out the site and optimize it for you. It’ll pay back several times in the long run. Check out our WordPress Maintenance plans here.
