How to Measure and Speed Up The Website Using PageSpeed Insights?

    PageSpeed Insights is a tool developed by Google that analyzes a web page's performance and provides recommendations for improving its speed. 

    Here is the step-by-step guide to measuring the speed of a website using PageSpeed Insights:

    1. Go to the “PageSpeed Insights” website.
    2. Enter the URL of the webpage you want to test into the “Enter a URL” field and click “Analyze.”

    PageSpeed Insights is available on both mobile and desktop versions. You can receive the scores of the analysis on any device. The score is determined by several variables, such as the time a website takes to load, how big it is, and how many HTTP requests it makes.

    How to improve website performance using PageSpeed Insights?

    The PageSpeed Insights report includes a list of suggestions for enhancing PageSpeed. These suggestions involve Image optimization, CSS, and JavaScript minification, and a decrease in HTTP requests. 

    You can apply the suggestions offered in the PageSpeed report to accelerate a webpage using PageSpeed Insights. Some ways to increase a webpage’s PageSpeed include:

    • Lowering the size of photographs or utilizing a more effective file format to optimize them. 
    • Reducing the size of CSS and JavaScript by deleting irrelevant characters from the code, such as whitespace and comments.
    • Enabling compression and reducing the size of your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files using a program like Gzip.
    • Lowering the number of HTTP requests by leveraging browser caching or merging several files into one.

    Let’s dive into more ways to apply suggestions of PageSpeed Insights to improve website performance.

    1. Do not chain important requests.

    Chaining critical requests refer to how browsers load your pages and the Critical Rendering Path. Before your page is viewable, some components, including JavaScript and CSS, must fully load.

    2. Minify CSS.

    CSS files are frequently larger than needed, making them harder for people to read. They could have extra spaces and carriage returns that just aren’t necessary for computers to comprehend their contents. Condensing your files by removing extraneous characters, spaces, and duplicates is the process of minifying CSS. This method is advised by Google since it can increase loading speed by reducing the size of your CSS files.

    3. Minify JavaScript.

    Minifying JavaScript means removing unnecessary characters from your code, such as white space, new line characters, and comments, without changing its functionality. This can be particularly beneficial for pages with a lot of JavaScript or accessed by users on slow internet connections. Removing unnecessary files can significantly reduce the size of JavaScript files leading to faster page loading times.

    4. Reduce the number of requests and transfer sizes.

    Your website will take longer to load the more queries browsers must make to load your pages. It makes natural that Google would advise you to reduce the volume of necessary requests. 

    There is no optimum amount of requests or set of permitted sizes. Google advises setting those standards for yourself instead of developing a performance budget.

    5. Cut down on main-thread work.

    The principal component of a user’s browser, known as the “main thread,” is in charge of transforming code into a webpage that visitors can interact with. CSS, JavaScript, and HTML are parsed and executed. It is also responsible for managing user interactions.

    This means that the main thread cannot process user requests while it is navigating the code of your website. A bad user experience and slow page loading times may arise from your site’s main thread work taking too long.

    6. Reschedule offscreen pictures.

    Offscreen picture deferral is more generally referred to as “lazy loading.” This implies that the browser will just load the images that are immediately visible rather than forcing it to load every image on a page before showing the above-the-fold content. A3 Lazy Load and Lazy Load by WP rocket are two WordPress plugins built exclusively for lazy loading. Lazy loading options are available in several image and performance optimization plugins, including Autoptimize.

    7. Effective Image Coding.

    As explained earlier, images have a big influence on how well your site performs. Compression, which can help lower your file sizes so they’ll load faster, is one of the most fundamental optimization best practices you might want to take into consideration. It’s also the main technique for carrying out Google’s advice to effectively encode images. 

    The following suggestions also determine whether you “pass” or “fail” the efficiently encode pictures audit: 

    • Serving pictures in the appropriate size.
    • The use of lazy loading (differing offscreen images).
    • Transforming photos into modern file formats like WebP.
    • GIFs and other video formats for animated content.

    8. Avoid making your Document Object Model (DOM) too big.

    The DOM, to put it simply, is how browsers convert HTML into objects. It makes use of a tree structure composed of distinct nodes, each of which represents an object. Naturally, your page will take longer to load if the DOM is larger.

    Your WordPress theme is frequently to blame if you’ve failed this audit in PageSpeed Insights. In addition to adding a lot of components to the DOM, heavy designs may also include complicated styling that makes your site load slowly.

    Conclusion

    Your Webmaster toolkit should always include Google PageSpeed Insights. The wisest use of your time is probably not to stress over your score and try to get the desired 100/100. You could be forced to put off other crucial chores that would bring you greater rewards.