11 Points Affecting The Page Speed Of Your Website-
Page speed insight is a Google tool for testing websites to get their speed/performance score.
It shows you where your website is lagging and how to fix it so that you can increase your score.
Now you may be wondering how to utilise it or what to make out of the suggestion?
As you can see, the page speed insight score is not so simple after all.
Before we can comprehend page speed insight, we must first understand the link between a website’s performance, speed, and usability.
The pages peed insight expresses the speed of the website using a number between 0 and 100. The better your ranking, the faster your website will load.
Google speed insights can give you information about any page on the Internet.
It also informs you of the areas for improvement that you must examine to enhance the page speed on the performance rank of your website.
Now, “areas for improvement” might request that you remove features such as a form, creating rendering difficulties.
Does it imply you should get rid of them?
No. Even if you remove a few features, articles, or facilities from your website, you can still face the same issues.
Also, you will constantly need to add scripts, codes, and pictures to develop new content, features, and so on, which can take longer to render/download on any given device.
As a result, it is completely normal to get a low-speed score for your site.
So, does it mean that you must refrain from doing something specific about it?
A blank website will automatically display a score of 100/100, but is this useful? No! So creating content is a must option.
But what you can do here is, the more content you create and the features you add to your site, the more you must optimise it.
It will assist you in maintaining a constant or higher speed score for your website.
It will assist you in maintaining a constant or higher speed score for your website.
TOOL TO MEASURE PAGE SPEED Website
Page Speed Insight is a Google developer tool that analyses your website and generates a page speed score while highlighting things that need to be improved to enhance the result.
Fill up the blank box with the link of your website and press the analyse button. It obtain a detailed analysis of that page of your website.
You can use this tool to check results for both mobile devices and desktops.
With the increase in mobile devices, it is safe to say that you must heavily focus on optimising your website accordingly.
Let us utilise the tool to learn more about it.
Common Errors In Lab Data for Page Speed Website
1) First Contentful Paint(FCP)
FCP is the length of time it takes from the moment of clicking your website URL to the loading of anything on the website.
It can be either a content, features, images, and so on.
Where, FCP is considered,
- Good : < 1.8sec.
- Needs Improvement : >1.8 & <3.0sec.
- Poor : >3.0sec.
2) Largest Contentful Paint(LCP)
LCP refers to the time it takes for a visitor to view the largest picture or block of content on your website.
Where LCP is,
- Good : <2.5sec.
- Needs Improvement : >2.5 & <4.0sec.
- Poor : >4.0sec.
Initially, Google used First Meaningful Paint(FMP) and Speed Index(SI) to measure the exact thing which LCP does.
However, because the matrix was frequently incorrect, it was impossible to determine the exact time of loading a website’s main content.
Therefore for the better, it upgraded it to LCP (Largest Contentful Paint).
3) Speed Index(SI)
SI is the amount of time it takes for a user to view everything on your website, including images, content, forms, and other features.
Where SI is considered to be,
- Good : <3.4sec.
- Needs Improvement : >3.4 & <5.8sec.
- Poor : >5.8sec.
4) Time To Interactive (TTI)
TTI refers to the time after which your website is entirely ready for user interaction.
Where a page is considered fully interactive,
- When the page displays major valuable content.
- The page responds to any interaction in less than 50 milliseconds.
Scoreboard of TTI is represented through,
- Good : <3.8 sec.
- Needs Improvement : >3.9 & <7.3sec.
- Poor : >7.3sec.
5) Total Booking Time(TBT)
TBT refers to the time when one of the most essential content is still loading, hindering responsiveness.
Where TBT is considered,
- Good : <200ms.
- Needs Improvement : >200 & <600ms.
- Poor : >600ms.
6) Cumulative Layout Shift(CLS)
CLS helps in addressing any problem with any unexpected movement inside your web page that may inadvertently do actual harm to users.
For example, your user does not wish to confirm an order and return it to its shopping cart.
But right at that time a link appears, prompting the user to inadvertently touch the confirmation button.
Because such links might cause serious harm to the user, CLS delivers a report addressing these concerns on your website.
Where CLS is considered,
- Good : <0.1.
- Needs Improvement : >0.1 & <0.25.
- Poor : >0.25.
Opportunities – Areas Of Improvement
The opportunity section provides you with the factors where there is room for improvement to enhance the page speed of your website.
1) Eliminate render-blocking resources
To understand this point, let’s consider your website.
When a user enters your URL, the browser downloads and reads your website’s code in a top-down format. Then it starts to execute the code one after the other.
After finishing the execution of the code, it further moves ahead to download all the text and images to present the user with a complete website.
But here’s the thing, the process of executing codes of form or other features takes a little longer than usual.
Therefore, if the form is present at the end of your site(which takes time to load), the user will fail to see the topmost part of your website.
This inability to render resources is shown by the eliminate render-blocking resources point.
2) Serve Images in Next-gen Formats
Google is urging you to utilise a next-generation format for pictures that are WebP, JPG 2000, and not JPG, PNG, BMP, and so on.
You can use the Squoosh. A free software designed by Google Chrome labs.
Squoosh software allows you to prepare your images in next-gen formats, resize them while preserving their aspect ratio, compress them, and so on.
3) Reduce initial server response time
Server response time can significantly affect your site’s traffic.
Therefore, if your initial server response time is high, you must upgrade your server or move your site to another hosting provider.
4) Reduce Unused CSS
Any CSS that is left unused might cause your website to take longer to load.
This is because the browser must download it each time a user enters your URL, slowing down your page performance.
5) Properly Sized Image
This point implies that the pictures must be responsive.
Google recommends using pictures straight from the WordPress media gallery to make the images responsive.
If you are using other CMS such as Joomla, it advises you to use the responsive images plugin or, if you use Drupal, then use the built-in responsive image style etc.
Click on Google to learn more about the preferable methods for proper size images in different CMS.
Conclusion
These are some of the most frequent problems and opportunities you may encounter while testing your website for page speed.
Therefore, these errors will vary from site to site. So, correct the errors based on the recommendation given to you.
You can check more on developers page of Google, which they keep on updating from time to time.
Please share your thoughts about it in the comments section below.