Introduction 

Being a blogger and constantly working towards the newer trends, how you can optimize your site is apparent. However, Google’s updates affect everyone’s blogging journey. Yet, apart from using helpful content, another important aspect is how fast my site loads to solve user intent for my customers. Here’s where Google Page speed comes into the picture. Users expect web pages to load swiftly, and search engines like Google prioritize fast-loading sites. In this guide, you will dive deep into the world of Google PageSpeed Insights and explore its pivotal role in SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

What is Google PageSpeed Insights?

A blogger or a website developer knows how website loading time affects its performance in terms of SERPs. It’s because it does affect your site’s user experience and, accordingly, the rankings. To identify such vitality, Google Page Speed Insights are a blessing in disguise. It’s a tool by Google that crawls a given website and tests its speed.

Moreover, the responsiveness of a website differs on mobile and desktop. Accordingly, it visits the site and suggests a score between 0 and 100 on each interface. A better score indicates that your site is well-optimized for user experience.

Besides, some do believe it is impossible, but the fact is that with proper standards, you can achieve 100% that is 100/100.

Fundamentals of Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed insights to help you assess your website speed, but you can’t ignore the technical jargon it poses. The report and tool present many words, terminologies, and perspectives to your site, which is no less than rocket science.

Therefore, let’s embark upon learning more about the report section-wise:

1. Core Web Vitals Assessment

The first and foremost part of the report says Passed or Failed. This indicated whether your site passed the Google page speed test or not. These are crucial and assess the parameters based upon several aspects for checking the site on mobile, which include:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

This parameter measures the performance with which the site loads. The LCP sheds light on when the largest content can fully appear for the user to access.

Google has an open-source framework of AMP pages, which optimizes content to load faster on mobile devices.  These have faster LCP and load times than standard mobile pages.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

CLS measures how much stuff moves on a web page while it loads. It checks if images, ads, or other things load and pushes down the content you’re trying to read.CLS gives a score between 0 and 1.  A Lower CLS is better.

In it, 0 means nothing moved. Besides, a high CLS score means the page content jumps around a lot. This isn’t good for users. Good pages load essential stuff first, so the page stays stable.

Moreover, developers test CLS with tools like Lighthouse. Fixing CLS issues makes the page load smoothly without jumping.

First Input Delay (FID)

The parameter determines the time your website takes to respond to your first interaction with the site. For instance, if you scroll down on Wikipedia, the FID will measure how much the section you open loads to the destination. It is noteworthy that trends indicate that INP will replace it soon.

2. Diagnose Performance Issues

After Core Web Vitals, the Diagnose Performance issues imply another section of secondary characteristics that play a significant role in page speed test Google.

These are divided into the categories given below:

Performance

It is an overall score of your site’s performance regarding loading speed and device optimization.

Practices

The category seems delusional but is practical, and the Google PageSpeed Test checks whether your site adheres to the best web development standards. This includes using a white-hat SEO approach, making a well-optimized website, and using secure internal/external connections with the domain and server.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a vast category that emphasizes your site’s optimization concerning search engines. It includes keywords, metadata, mobile optimization, readability, structuring, visuals, and similar factors.

3. Opportunities

Beneath the Diagnose Performance Issues section, another division specifies the Opportunities. The section might seem like a premium or marketing stunt, but it suggests Google’s measures for improving your web performance, focusing on speed and such aspects.

These recommendations help you optimize images for SEO, make the code lightweight, reduce the server response time, and much more.

By analyzing all these factors, consulting web experts, and accordingly working on them, you can improve Google Page Speed. It enhances your site’s performance, readability, UI, and UX.

How To Use Google Page Speed Insights?

You have learned about Google Page Speed Insights, but knowing how to use it would be one of your biggest mysteries right now.

To begin with,

• Visit the Google PageSpeed Insights webpage 
• Click Analyze and wait for the tool to complete its test

In its results, the Google pagespeed insights crawl and display answers in the field data. You would see its result in CrUX, which stands for Chrome User Experience. Further, it leverages the Lighthouse API to measure webpage performance. So, don’t forget to remove obstructions affecting performance and rankings.

Ideal Range of Google Page Speed Insights

Upon testing Google Page Speed Insights for one of our high-performing sites, we found out that the score also reaches up to 100/100. Besides, a score of 100 doesn’t need only to be good. The low range includes below 50. Hence, a score between 90-100 stands out as excellent.

Further, for the range between 50 and 89, you are on the verge of improvement, so it needs effort. While a score below 50 is relatively poor for you to excel.

Below is a breakdown of the same:

While a score can be enough to piss you off but remember that Google does provide you recommendations on where you lag and how to improve, some websites do rank with a poor score, while others have an excellent score but don’t impress their target audience. 

It’s noteworthy that even Google has some websites that score below 100/100. Yet, it is worth considering that users are more determined to leave a site if the loading time exceeds 1 second to a maximum of 10 seconds. 

How To Improve Google Page Speed Insights Score?

You would be wondering, apart from Google’s recommendations, what else can you do to improve website speed test Google scores? Honestly, it doesn’t matter whether you are a backend developer, technical SEO specialist, or a person who has achieved xxx feats. It’s pretty apparent to be confused about how to improve the score. So, let’s establish a firm grip on it!

Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources

Render-blocking resources are those which prevent a website from loading quickly. It’s standard, as elements like CSS, JS, and external fonts cause your browser to load its elements before the site structure or skeleton.

Therefore, you can remove these obstructions that do not affect your site and even improve the PSI score.

• Navigate to the Opportunities section in the PSI report
• Click the arrowhead next to Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources

The report will show you a list of resources causing the issue and render blockage. Further, you can work on them to improve your PSI score and conquer SERPs.

Reduce Server Response Time (TTFB)

Server response time indicates the browser’s delay in displaying the requested webpage upon parsing due to server issues. It is also shown as Time to First Byte, abbreviated as TTFB.

If that still sounds complex, then the internet works on a request-response model where responses are displayed using a server. The latter indicates the time your browser takes to show when servers receive a single data byte.

• Check if the site servers respond slowly
• Compare, test, review, and find a server that is responsive and provides low-latency
• Setup the site such that the pages respond faster
• Now, migrate the data, including database, content, and similar, for a better CDN

Moreover, a slow TTFB affects Google PSI and rankings because the browser takes longer to display the webpage.

Properly Optimize Your Images

Being a blogger, you would be following specific measures to optimize your images for WordPress or other CMS. This includes using alt keywords, captions, descriptions, and similar. You can even use a WordPress plugin to optimize images in bulk.

• Go to WordPress and select Add Plugin
• Look for TinyPNG, install and activate it
• Open Media Library and click Bulk Optimization

The tool will start optimizing the images and will even display the difference in terms of size and speed that the process has created.

Further, you would be compressing them before uploading and can use a plugin to upload webp format images instead of jpg or jpeg. Also, take pictures of a specific resolution and include focus keywords in image details.

Prevent Chaining Critical Requests

Chaining critical requests happens when a web page needs to load multiple resources in a specific order before it can display. For example, the HTML text waits for images to load, images wait for CSS, and so on. This creates a chain of dependencies.

If any resource in the chain fails to load, the whole page fails. This can create delays and errors. To prevent chaining, web developers can prioritize the loading of critical resources like HTML text first. Less important resources like images and CSS can load asynchronously later.

Adding “async” and “defer” attributes to script tags in the code enables asynchronous loading. The async attribute allows a resource to load in the background while the rest of the page loads. Defer attributes tells the browser to delay the loading of a resource until after the page content appears.

Using async and defer breaks the loading chain by preventing interdependencies. The core content loads right away without waiting for other assets. This results in a better Google website speed test and more reliable loading of web pages. Chaining critical requests creates bottlenecks.

Here’s where Async and defer allow the browser to load the page incrementally rather than sequentially. This improves performance.

Preload Key Requests

Preloading key requests points the browser to provide the vital aspects and load them first so that less crucial ones can be loaded later and the main content loads faster. The term mainly specifies whatever the webpage requires to open in its initial phase. This includes fonts but can consist of other aspects as well.

Reduce CSS and JavaScript

CSS and JavaScript are essential parts of a website, especially for its design and optimization. Hence, these are complex and slow your website loading time, especially if it’s unoptimized for a long time. Even reducing its size by using best practices further helps.

Plus, special tools help for the purpose. Plugins like Hummingbird and W3 Total Cache.

Troubleshoot Multiple Page Redirects

When you redirect one page to another, it removes your traffic crawling from one page to another. Then, if it redirects and it slows down your site’s performance. Besides, Google can cope with up to 10 redirects, yet the target site does impact the score.

Apart from that, reducing the DOM size also helps!

What Role Does Google Page Speed Play In SEO?

Google Page Speed does impact SEO as per Google algorithm, irrespective of different updates like the HCU. The better your site speed, the more efficient its performance and decrease the bounce rate, thus elevating SERPs. You would find it tricky, but the core of Google relies on users.

Whether your content is helpful to the users, how quickly and conveniently it fulfills search intent, and similar factors do come into the picture. Scraping the stats, the average 3G loading time of the site was 3 seconds, after which the users left the site.

However, you should know that page loading is generally in seconds and based upon it, the tool evaluates the score. Even YouTube, a directory of Google, has a PageSpeed Insights lower than 50, yet it serves the target audience’s purpose and ranks higher.  

The Bottom Line

If you were looking for what is “Google Page Speed”, you would have got your answer. It is a tool that assesses your site’s speed in terms of performance, efficiency, and loading time for mobile and desktop.

Further, it helps you to decrease the bounce rate and improve user experience. Also, it does impact SEO when a user leaves your site. We can help you to improve your Google PageSpeed Score or you can install some plugins for this purpose to at least get a decent score for having good website performance.