Google Pagespeed Insights: The Ultimate Guide To Boost Your Pagespeed With The 7 Most Powerful Strategies
Are you struggling with a low pagespeed insights score? A low pagespeed score often leads to poor user experience which in turn results in a low conversion rate & lower SEO rankings.
Don’t worry! You are not alone. A lot of website owners are struggling to improve their pagespeed insights score. Let’s discuss the pagespeed insights score and the powerful strategies to improve this.
If you are not from a coding background, that’s perfectly fine. As we will mention the solutions that can be implemented by non-coders like you and me
Page Contents
What is Google Pagespeed Insights?
Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a tool developed by Google, that measures the pagespeed of your website. It analyzes your website’s pagespeed performance for the desktop version and the mobile version and scores on a scale of 0 to 100.
Google PageSpeed Insights also suggests how to improve the pageSpeed score. It provides both lab and field data about your website. Lab data is used for debugging issues whereas field data is useful for real-world user experience.
What are the Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are a set of performance metrics developed by Google, used to measure the user experience for loading performance, visual stability, and interactivity of your web pages.
Let’s take a look at the three pillars of core web vitals
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- First Input Delay (FID) is now replaced with Interaction to Next Paint (INP).
- Cumulative Layout shift(CLS)
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP):
The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is the user experience (UX) metric, which measures how long it takes to render the largest piece of content in the visible area. The largest content can be:
- Images
- Video poster images (images that are shown to the user before loading the video)
- Background images
- Block-level text
In order to pass the Core Web Vitals assessment, your website should have a Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) of 2.5 seconds or less. Whereas if a user waits more than 4 seconds on your website to see the content, that indicates a poor user experience.
| LCP range | Remarks |
| < 2.5 seconds | Good |
| 2.5 seconds – 4.0 seconds | Improvement Needed |
| > 4.0 seconds | Poor |
- First Input Delay (FID):
First Input Delay (FID), also referred to as Input Latency, is used to measure how long it takes for your web page to react to the first interaction.
In simple words, it is the measurement of the time that occurs between when a user interacts with your website and when their browser responds.
According to Google, a score of less than 100 milliseconds is considered a good score whereas a score is more than 300 ms is a poor score.
| FID range | Remarks |
| < 100 ms | Good |
| 100 ms- 300 ms | Improvement Needed |
| > 300 ms | Poor |
Important Note: In March 2024, FID was removed as a Core Web Vital. It is replaced by a stable Core Web Vital metric INP (Interaction to Next Paint).
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP):
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is a newly launched performance metric by Google that is used to measure user interface responsiveness.
In simple words, Interaction to Next Paint focuses on measuring your web page’s response according to user interaction with the website.
Similar to the other performance metrics, the INP score can be in one of the three thresholds. A good INP value should always be within 200 milliseconds.
| INP range | Remarks |
| < 200 ms | Good |
| 200 ms- 500 ms | Improvement Needed |
| > 500 ms | Poor |
- Cumulative Layout shift(CLS):
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is one of the pillars of Core Web Vital metrics that calculates the shifting of the webpage’s elements while the page is being loaded and rendered.
In simple words, Cumulative layout Shift is used to determine the visual stability of a web page from a user perspective by considering the below factors:
- Layout shift
- Impact fraction (how an unstable element impacts the visible area between two frames)
You should strive to reach your CLS score within 0.1 to provide your audience with a better user experience.
| CLS range | Remarks |
| < 0.1 | Good |
| 0.1 – 0.25 | Improvement Needed |
| > 0.25 | Poor |
Other performance metrics are present that impact your website’s pageSpeed insights performance.
- First Contentful Paint (FCP):
First Contentful Paint (FCP) is a user-centric metric that is used to measure how long it takes for a user’s browser to load DOM elements (images, videos, text, etc) of your web pages.
| FCP range | Remarks |
| 0 – 1.8 seconds | Good |
| 1.8 seconds -3.0 seconds | Improvement Needed |
| > 3.0 seconds | Poor |
- Speed Index (SI):
Speed Index (SI) is a web page load performance metric, that measures how quickly the contents of your web pages are visibly populated. SI is dependent on the size of the visible area.
| SI range | Remarks |
| 0 – 3.4 seconds | Good |
| 3.4 seconds – 5.8 seconds | Improvement Needed |
| > 5.8 seconds | Poor |
- Total Blocking Time (TBT):
Total Blocking Time (TBT) measures how long your web page responds to specific user input. Several factors can be the reason for TBT like poorly optimized code, excessive plugin use, server performance, and large file sizes.
| TBT range | Remarks |
| 0 – 200 ms | Good |
| 200 ms – 600 ms | Improvement Needed |
| > 600 ms | Poor |
- Time to First Byte (TTFB):
Time to First Byte (TTFB) measures the time between a user’s browser requesting your web page and when it receives the first byte of information from the server. Different factors that can reduce your TTFB score: slow DNS lookups, SSL connection, and so on.
| TTFB range | Remarks |
| < 800 ms | Good |
| 800 ms – 1800 ms | Improvement Needed |
| > 1800 ms | Poor |
- Time to Interactive (TTI):
Time to Interactive (TTI) measures the amount of time your website has been rendered and is ready for user input. The factors that significantly impact TTI are excessive resource requests and large resource sizes.
| TTI range | Remarks |
| 0 – 3.8 second | Good |
| 3.9 second – 7.3 second | Improvement Needed |
| > 7.3 second | Poor |
Why is Google Pagespeed Insights score important for your website?
Let’s dive into the importance of a high Google PSI score for your website.
- User Experience
A higher pagespeed Insights indicates a fast-loading website, which leads to a better user experience for your visitors. A user is more likely to engage with your website’s content and stay longer on your website. It will increase the average on-page time of your website.
- SEO Ranking
Google considers the pageSpeed as one of the important factors in its ranking algorithm. A fast-loading website tends to rank higher in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), which can boost organic traffic.
- Conversion Rate
The conversion rate measures the percentage of visitors who convert to lead. A fast-loading website can positively impact conversion rate, as users are more likely to complete the desired action.
The desired action might be completing a purchase, downloading an ebook, filling up a form, signing up for a trial, booking a demo, subscribing to a course, or something else.
How to Measure Your Website’s PageSpeed Insights Score?
PageSpeed can be measured easily in Google Pagespeed Insights (PSI). Let’s dive into the process of measuring PageSpeed in Google PSI.
Step 1: Go to Google PageSpeed Insights. Enter any web page’s URL and click on Analyze.
Step 2: After analyzing the web page’s page speed performance, It will provide a mobile score as well as a desktop score based on the overall performance of the core web vital matrix.
Step 3: you can also see the suggestion for improvement of the pagespeed performance.
What is considered a good PageSpeed Insights Score?
- If the PageSpeed insights score is greater than 90, it is considered a good score.
- A Pagespeed insights score between 50 to 89 indicates the webpage’s pageSpeed performance needs to be improved.
- A pagespeed insights score of less than 50 is categorized as a poor score. It means the web page fails the site speed test.
The Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) dataset provides Real-user experience data in Google PSI. PSI reports are based on real users’ FCP, LCP, FID, CLS, SI, TBT, and TTI experience.
Let’s see the weightage of each performance metric for Google pagespeed insights.
| Performance metrics | Weightage |
| First Contentful Paint (FCP) | 10% |
| Speed Index (SI) | 10% |
| Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | 25% |
| Total Blocking Time (TBT) | 30% |
| Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) | 25% |
There are several alternative tools are also available like GTmetrix, and Lighthouse that you can use for website speed tests.
The difference between Pagespeed insights vs lighthouse
While Google PageSpeed Insights and Google Lighthouse, both tools are used for pagespeed performance, their scores differ based on certain factors. Let’s understand these performance factors and how they make the score different.
| Google PSI | Lighthouse | |
| Data Sourcing Methods | Google PSI scores are based on controlled environment data(lab data) as well as real-user data (field data). | Lighthouse uses only lab data. (real-user data). |
| Test Location | Google page speed Insights is an automated tool that runs from the Google server. | Lighthouse is a manual tool that runs from a local Chrome browser. |
| Number of pages Accessed | In PSI only one webpage can be analyzed at a time. | In Lighthouse, multiple pages can be tested at a time. |
| Network Throttling | Google Pagespeed insights runs the website without throttling a fast network connection. Then, it simulates how the web page would have loaded on the slow connection. | Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools allows a user to select between simulated and browser-level “applied” throttling. |
| CPU performance | Pagespeed Insight measures the CPU performance of a web page by evaluating the time to fully load the web page’s content (HTML, JavaScript, and media files). | Lighthouse reports include the data on the web page’s CPU performance, FCP, and DOMContentLoaded time. |
| Chrome version | Pagespeed insights uses the latest version of Google Chrome. So it can be different from the user’s Chrome version. | While Lighthouse uses the same Chrome version as the end user. |
7 ways to improve your website’s pagespeed score?
Now, you have a brief idea about Google PageSpeed Insights score. Also, you have seen the importance of a high pageSpeed insights score. Let’s dive into the strategies to improve the page speed performance by optimizing the website performance.
- Optimization of all images is the most effective way to improve your website’s pagespeed score:
Images are the most powerful form of communication. An image can convey a message very quickly. So, for any website, images are one of the essential resources.
However, large-sized images can decrease the pagespeed insights performance score by increasing the load time of the web page.
To improve the website’s pagespeed performance, you need to reduce the image size as much as possible. You can convert your large image files to WebP, AVIF format.
If your website has 10 images of 2 MB, that indicates a total of 20 MB images need to be downloaded. But when these images are converted in WebP and AVIF, it will likely reduce the total size to a maximum of 500 KB. so, automatically the page loading time will be reduced.
RabbitLoader converts your large PNG and JPEG images into modern webP and AVIF formats. It will compress the images without losing quality. You don’t need to optimize the images one by one. Bulk image optimization will be done automatically when you are using RabbitLoader.
If you have a WordPress website, you just need to install and activate this plugin. Apart from the WordPress website, RabbitLoader is also available in Woo-Commerce, Shopify, PHP, and Laravel websites.
- Minification of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files can reduce page loading time:
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are the fundamental elements of any web page. HTML creates the content of a webpage whereas CSS Stylshhets make the webpage stylish. And finally, JavaScript is used to make the webpage interactive.
Usually, the file sizes become large due to unnecessary uses of spaces & comments in the code to make the code more readable. These large files increase the page load time.
Minification is the process of removing all unnecessary spaces, Comments, and characters from a file. When a file is minified, the file size will reduce, which leads to a faster loading website.
The best way to effortlessly minify these files is by using RabbitLoader if you don’t have any coding knowledge. RabbitLoader will manage this minification of your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
- By enabling lazy loading you can improve your pagespeed insights score:
RabbitLoader will also help you to speed up your website by enabling lazy loading. Lazy loading (also known as on-demand loading) is an optimization strategy to improve the website’s performance if your website has a lot of images.
Instead of loading the entire webpage, Lazy loading only renders the images that are visible above the fold.
Lazy loading also is applied to other media files such as videos, and the webpage’s content like text as well as comments.
- Using browser cache to speed up your website:
Browser caching is the most common optimization technique. Browser caches temporarily store the static resources of a web page such as HTML files, CSS Stylesheets, images, and scripts. So, the browser doesn’t need to load from the first to render a web page.
Let’s understand with an example.
You are visiting RabbitLoader.com for the first time.
Your browser downloads the static contents(images, CSS stylesheets, JavaScript) into the cache.
The next time you revisit RabbitLoader.com, these static contents are loaded from the browser cache.
Thus, significantly decreasing this loading time.
Implementing a browser cache manually requires a lot of time as well as effort. There are several cache plugins available like RabbitLoader, W3 total cache, and many more.
However, when you are using RabbitLoader for other optimization techniques, then why do you invest extra money in other cache plugins? RabbitLoader will also take care of this browser caching.
- By Generating Critical CSS you can improve your website’s performance:
Eliminate render-blocking resources, the most popular warning in Google Pagespeed Insight can be fixed by generating critical CSS.
When a browser encounters a CSS stylesheet in HTML files, it typically blocks the rendering process. Not all CSS stylesheets are needed in the viewport. That’s why it’s crucial to generate critical CSS for your web page to boost PageSpeed.
But, how to create Cricial CSS to speed up your website?
Don’t worry! RabbitLoader automatically grabs the required CSS to visualize the view-port content and inlines it. By creating critical CSS files for every web page, RabbitLoader optimizes the CSS stylesheet size with a 98% improvement.
As a result, you can achieve a good Google PageSpeed Insights score. Without generating critical CSS, you can’t achieve a 90+ pageSpeed score.
In the above picture, you can see that RabbitLoader optimizes an original CSS file (2.35 MB) into just 35.03 KB by generating critical CSS, indicating it reduces the CSS File’s size by 98 %.
- Deferring JavaScript can improve the performance metrics:
Though JavaScript plays a crucial role on a website, it is not the critical piece in the first place, especially when we are talking about page loading speed.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<script src = "myscript.js" defer>
</script>
</head>
<body>
<div>
<h1> RabbitLoader.com </h1>
<h3> This is an example of defer attribute. </h3>
</div>
</body>
</html> RabbitLoader uses the defer attribute to indicate your script will only execute after rendering the Web page. Deferring JavaScript can improve FID, TBT, and TTI metrics.
So, your website’s pagespeed will automatically improve.
- Use Content Delivery Network (CDN) to Reduce Network Latency:
A physical distance between a user and the origin server can be the reason for latency. RabbitLoader’s integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN) reduces this distance by distributing static content across the edge servers worldwide. So, the page loading time will automatically decrease.
Without CDN
With CDN
FAQ:
1. What are Render-Blocking Resources?
Render-blocking resources are stylesheets, scripts, and HTML files that block the browser from rendering the web pages’s content above the fold. These resources affect the report of core web vitals assessment.
Conclusion
If your website’s Google PageSpeed Insights score is poor, you need to improve this score by speeding up the website for a better user experience as well as SEO rankings. Here, we have suggested the most powerful strategies to reduce the loading time.
If you are not from a coding background, you must use some page speed optimization plugins to achieve a good PSI score. Also, it’s important to keep in mind that using too many plugins can reduce the page load time.
The solution is here. When you are using RabbitLoader, no other optimization tools are required to boost the pagespeed insights data.
