Are you looking to increase the PageSpeed Score of your WordPress website? Then you are in the right place.
In this blog, I am going to share some useful tips and methods that will help you to optimize your website. And you can achieve better results than before.
What is PageSpeed score and Why is it important?
PageSpeed Insights is an essential tool by Google. It analyzes your website’s content both on mobile and desktop. And gives you important suggestions that can help you improve the speed of your website pages.
It gives a score after reviewing your page’s result. That is called as PageSpeed Score. A score of 90 or higher is considered fast. a score between 50 to 90 is considered average and under 50 is slow. Also, it estimates how much faster your website pages will become after performing the changes.
If you can implement the changes it recommends, the website will be able to perform better, the user experience will increase so that the website can rank higher on the results page of the search engine.
What are the other tools to measure the PageSpeed score?
Other tools can do the same as Google PageSpeed Insights does. These are Pingdom & GTMetrix. We can also try these for measuring the PageSpeed score and checking the areas of improvement.
We can rely on these two websites, but you shouldn’t forget PageSpeed Insights. As it gives the key suggestions for your website improvements.
We will be using our website as an example. And share the screenshots from PageSpeed Insights and tell you how you can fix it.
Our Website’s Score on PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights score of ZoneWP’s Desktop website
As you can see in the image above, the desktop version of the ZoneWP website scored over 90 on PageSpeed Insight, which is a really good score.
PageSpeed Insights score of ZoneWP’s Mobile website
The mobile version of the ZoneWP website scored 75.
Let’s take a look at some suggestions on how to improve the PageSpeed score of the mobile version of our website.
Some Common Suggestions from PageSpeed Insights
- Serve images in next-gen formats
- Eliminate render-blocking resources
- Remove unused CSS
- Properly size images
- Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy
How to fix these issues
1. Serve images in next-gen formats
Images are a common problem for most of the websites. As the size of the images is more, it makes the web page load slower.
PageSpeed Insights suggests you upload images on formats like JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP. These formats provide better compression means less size occupancy in your website than PNG or JPEG. It means faster downloads and lower consumption of data.
Also, this warning can be resolved by uploading images after compressing. We use TinyJPG to compress pictures. It reduces the file size without compromising on the quality.
Several plugins can help convert and optimize images, These plugins are
- Imagify – WebP & Image Compression and Optimization
- Autoptimize
- WebP Express
- Image optimization & Lazy Load by Optimole
- Smush Image Optimization, Compression, and Lazy Load
- EWWW Image Optimizer
After optimizing and compressing the images, use it on your website and you will see a better PageSpeed score. Now let’s move to our next suggestion.
2. Eliminate render-blocking resources
This warning tells you that there is some JavaScript / CSS code that blocks your website resources. To fix this issue, some plugins are available that can optimize your website’s CSS, async JS, and JavaScript. These plugins are
- Autoptimize
- Hummingbird – Speed up, Cache, Optimize Your CSS and JS
- Asset CleanUp: Page Speed Booster
Try any of these plugins and you can easily solve this issue.
3. Remove unused CSS
Plugins can add additional CSS to your website. And the CSS takes time to load, which increases the loading time of the page. We can fix this by removing unused plugins/apps from your website. Also, the above plugins can help to minimize and optimize the CSS and improve the PageSpeed score of your website.
4. Properly size images
We need to change the size of the images to the correct responsive size, keeping all the devices in mind. If your image is larger, it will not load properly, resulting in wasted bytes and slowing down the loading time of your webpage.
To keep a proper image size, we use plugins like
- WP Paint
- WordPress Image Editor
- DigiWidgets
5. Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy
It is one of the crucial factors for improving the PageSpeed score. We can fix this issue by caching some elements of our website. We can define the time limit for various parts like codes, style sheets & various types of images. And, for frequent visitors, a longer cache life can speed up the website.
Here are some plugins that can help to cache our website:
- W3 Total Cache
- LiteSpeed Cache
- WP Fastest Cache
- WP-Optimize – Clean, Compress, Cache
You may find some more suggestions, such as Reduce JavaScript execution time, Minimize main-thread work. These are related to JavaScript and CSS and can be optimized and fixed using the above-mentioned plugins in the No.2 section.
Conclusion
We have come to the end of this blog. Start from the main issues of image optimization, resizing, caching. After that, you will see some significant changes to the PageSpeed Insight score.
We hope you’ve found this blog helpful. Please let us know which tools and plugins you used to check and improve your website’s PageSpeed score in the comment section below.
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