9 Smart Techniques to Avoid Enormous Network Payloads Warnings

Are you struggling to fix the avoid enormous network payloads warning on Google PageSpeed Insights?

Avoid Enormous Network Payloads is one of the most common warnings you come across when auditing your website’s page speed performance on Google PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse. This warning indicates you need to reduce the page size of your WordPress website.

There are several ways to mitigate this warning such as by optimizing all images, implementing lazy loading, using CDNs for the distribution of the static resources, and other optimization techniques. Let’s understand these optimization techniques in detail.  

What is The Meaning of Network Payloads?

Before diving into the avoid enormous network payload warnings, first, we will explain what is network payloads.  

When a user loads your website, the browser sends the HTTP requests to your server. The origin server transfers your website’s resources through the HTTP response. Network payloads indicate the total size of these transferred resources such as:

• HTML files
• CSS styles sheets
• JavaScript files
• Media files (Images and videos).  

Understanding The Avoid Enormous Network Payloads Warning

In a simple word, this avoids enormous network payload warnings, indicating your web page size is too large than the recommended page size (less than 1600 KiB) by Google PageSpeed Insight. This large page size is correlated with the longer loading time. 

This enormous network payload warning is triggered by Google PageSpeed Insights when your Page size is larger than 1600 KiB or 1.6 MB. In order to achieve a good Google PSI score, you need to reduce your page size. 

Why Fix Avoid Enormous Network Payloads Warning

This enormous network payload indicates a large page size which negatively impacts your WordPress website’s PageSpeed performance, Core Web Vital’s performance (especially in Largest Contentful Paint), and the user experience.

Therefore, by reducing network payloads you can improve your:

• Improving the loading time
• Reducing Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) time
• Improving the overall pagespeed Insight score 
• Enhance the user experience 

Let’s discuss these in detail.

Improving the Loading Time

The larger the page size, the longer it might take time to download and render the website’s resources on the browser. You can decrease your page size by reducing the network payloads. 

Therefore, loading your website’s resources would not take a long time and would improve your web page loading time.

Reducing Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) Time

Largest Contentful Paint is a performance metric that calculates the time it takes to render the largest content (hero image, text block) on the browser. Reducing the network payload can improve the LCP time, resulting in a better user experience.

Improving the Overall PageSpeed Insight Score 

Google PageSpeed Insights scores your website’s pagespeed performance based on the real user experience. By fixing this enormous network payload, you can achieve a good pagespeed score.

Enhance The User Experience 

As discussed, reducing the enormous network payload can improve your website’s loading performance. A fast-loading website meets user expectations and results in a good conversion rate. 

The Reason Behind This Network Payloads Warning

Before diving into the solution, it’s important to find the root cause behind this enormous network payloads warning. Here we will discuss the most common reason for this network payload warning which includes.

Let’s cover these reasons in detail.

• Unoptimized CSS and JavaScript Files: 

Unoptimized CSS and JavaScript files increase the file size. Therefore, they might be considered render-blocking resources and increase your website’s total blocking time.

• Large-Sized Images: 

Large-sized unoptimized images often increase your page size and are considered the root cause of the enormous network payloads warning in Google PageSpeed Insights. 

• Using Too Many Plugins 

Every WordPress plugin has its own HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that need to be executed during your web page loading time. Therefore, using multiple plugins would increase your network payload by enlarging your page size.

9 Techniques to Fix This Avoid Enormous Network Payloads Warning

Now you already the reason behind this enormous network payloads warning. To pass your Google PSI audit, you need to fix this warning. There are several ways to fix this Google PSI warning including: 

1. Selecting a fast-loading WordPress theme
2. Optimizing all images
3. Compression all resources
4. Minify CSS and JavaScript files 
5. Implement lazy load for above-the-fold content
6. Apply browser caching mechanism 
7. Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)
8. Optimize the web fonts
9. Avoid using too many plugins

Let’s see how to implement these 7 techniques to fix the enormous network payload warning.

Selecting a Fast-Loading WordPress Theme

A poorly developed WordPress theme might be the reason for an enormous network payload warning. If the fundamental resources of your WordPress theme such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are unoptimized then it would increase your page size.

To avoid this issue, you should choose a fast-loading WordPress theme. Here we are listing 5 WordPress themes that you can consider for your website.

1. Astra
2. Divi
3. OceanWP
4. Avada
5. Neve

Optimizing Your Images

In order to make your website more attractive, you often add high-resolution images to your website. This would increase the network payloads and reduce the PageSpeed performance of your website. 

The most common way to optimize large PNG or JPEG images is to convert them into next-generation formats such as WebP or AVIF. By converting images into WebP or AVIF format, you can reduce the image size without compressing their original quality.

Manually optimizing your all images can be a time-consuming process. To save time you must use an optimizing plugin like RabbitLoader. In bellow, we will discuss how RabbitLoader will help you in image optimization.  

Compression All Resources

Another way you can reduce the enormous network payloads is by compressing the resources of your WordPress website such as HTML file, CSS stylesheet, and JavaScript file.

There are two compression methods available to compress your website’s assets.

1. GZIP is the traditional method for compressing your website’s resources, such as HTML files, CSS stylesheets, and JavaScript files before sending them to the network, improving the page load time.

2. Brotli uses a modern compression algorithm to improve the compression ratio. Brotli compression is more flexible than GZIP with a higher compression ratio.

When you use RabbitLoader, it compresses all resources, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, using the Brotli algorithm and sends the compressed files over the network.  

Minify CSS and Javascript Files

Minification is a well-known optimization technique for reducing the network payloads on your website. By minifying your website’s fundamental assets (CSS and JavaScript files), you can remove unnecessary characters like spaces and comments from your CSS and JavaScript files.

When you are using RabbitLoader, why are you putting extra effort into installing another plugin to minimize your CSS and JavaScript files? RabbitLoader will automatically minify your CSS and JavaScript files to reduce your page size.

Implement Lazy Load for Above-The-Fold Content

If your WordPress website has a lot of images, you need to implement lazy loading. Lazy loading is an optimization techniques that allow your browser to load the above-the-fold images. The rest of the images will load once you scroll down to them.

By Implating lazy loading you can fix this enormous network payload warning and improve the pagespeed performance of your WordPress website. 

Lazy Loading can be easily implemented by installing a WordPress plugin, however, when you are using RabbitLoader for optimization, it will take care of your lazy loading along with other optimization features.

Apply Browser Caching Mechanism 

A browser cache temporarily stores your website’s static resources, such as HTML files, CSS stylesheets, and JavaScript files, to speed up the website loading. Thus it would reduce the HTTP requests to the server.

Therefore, by applying the browser caching mechanism you can decrease the number of HTTP requests, reducing the network payloads in your WordPress website.

You can easily apply the browser caching mechanism by installing a WordPress plugin like RabbitLoader. 

Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) reduces network latency by reducing the real-time distance between your user and the origin server. A CDN stores your website’s static content, such as CSS stylesheets, JavaScript files, and images, in the edge/ proxy server worldwide.

Therefore, when a user visits your website, the website’s static content will be served from the nearest proxy/ edge server instead of the origin server. This would reduce the network payload on your website.

If you are looking for a free Content Delivery Network (CDN) service for your WordPress website, you must install RabbitLoader. 

Optimize The Web Fonts

While web fonts make a website visually attractive, unoptimized fonts increase the website’s network payload. The best practice is to use a web-safe font to avoid this enormous network payloads warning.

However, if you want to use web fonts that are not web-safe, you must optimize these web fonts by adding the preload attribute in your HTML tag. For more information, go through our previous blog.

If you are looking for a non-coding solution, install RabbitLoader. It will optimize your web fonts, so you don’t need to put in any extra effort.

Avoid Using Too Many Plugins

In order to optimize your WordPress website’s performance, if you use too many plugins, it would increase your website’s network payload due to its inbuilt HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.

In simple words, every plugin has its own HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. These files are also executed during the web page’s loading, automatically increasing the network payload. 

To avoid this enormous network payloads warning, you should choose a WordPress plugin that has multiple optimization features. Thus, you don’t need to install other WordPress plugins.

When you are using RabbitLoader, you don’t need any other WordPress plugins for image optimization, lazy load implementation, and other optimization techniques.

How RabbitLoader will help you mitigate this enormous network payloads warning?

At this point, you already know how to fix your avoid enormous network payloads warning and speed up your WordPress site. Let’s explore RabbitLoader’s core features to mitigate this enormous network payloads warning.

1. RabbitLoader converts your all images into WebP and AVIF format. For its in-built bulk image optimization feature, it lossless compresses your images and reduces the network payload, resulting in a faster WordPress website.

2. By implementing lazy loading, RabbitLoader will reduce the rendering time of your website’s largest contentful element. Thus, it will improve your LCP performance, enhancing the user experience.

3. By generating a critical CSS file, RabbitLoader will eliminate your render-blocking resources and reduce the CSS file size by 98%, decreasing your website’s Total Blocking Time.

4. RabbitLoader compresses your all website’s assets like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript by using Brotli methods. It would reduce your enormous network payloads, increasing your WordPress website’s performance.

5. RabbitLoader has an advanced caching mechanism that helps you avoid enormous network payloads warnings by reducing the number of HTTP requests to the origin server.

6. RabbitLoader has an in-built Content Delivery Network (CDN) with 300+ edge servers worldwide, reducing the network latency.

If you come across this avoid enormous network payloads warning during your website’s pagespeed audit, and you are looking for a non-coding solution, you need to install RabbitLoader to fix this warning.

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

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

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
2. First Input Delay (FID) is now replaced with Interaction to Next Paint (INP).
3. 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.

• 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.

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.

• 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.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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?

1. If the PageSpeed insights score is greater than 90, it is considered a good score.

2. A Pagespeed insights score between 50 to 89 indicates the webpage’s pageSpeed performance needs to be improved.

3.  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.

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. 

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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. 

4. 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.

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.

5.  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 %.

6. 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.

Check Also: PageSpeed Optimization Services

7. 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

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.

WP Rocket vs RabbitLoader: Which Plugin Would Improve Your PageSpeed Score Better ?

WP Rocket is the most popular cache plugin in the WordPress ecosystem. Since 2013, WP Rocket has been leading the optimization scene for wordpress websites. But how does it compare to RabbitLoader?

Here, we will see a detailed comparison between WP Rocket and RabbitLoader, explore the usability of both optimization plugins, and compare the pagespeed scores after installing the plugins individually on the same website. 

We would test both the plugins on cellofy.shop one by one & see which plugins helps the website reach a higher pagespeed score in the pagespeed insight test.

WP Rocket vs RabbitLoader: in short

WP Rocket is a premium cache plugin to optimize your wordpress website for better pagespeed performance. With close to 4 million websites using the plugin as claimed by WP Media, it is the leading cache plugin by some distance. 

Over the years Wp cache has moved from just being a cache plugin & have introduced other optimization features too, namely minification, preloading & a few more features to make it more than just a cache plugin.

But when you are using WP Rocket, one would still need to install Imagify for image optimization. If you feel the need for a CDN service you need the premium RocketCDN. And for lazy loading, you need Rocket lazy loading.

In comparison, RabbitLoader is an all-in-one optimization plugin, you would not need any other optimization plugins to improve the performance of your wordpress or woocommerce website.

What is WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a premium wordpress cache plugin. The goal of this plugin is to speed up your website, which is necessary to improve the user experience as well as SEO rankings.

Other than the cache, WP Rocket also uses various optimization techniques like caching, minification of CSS stylesheets, JavaScript files, among others. Wp Rocket being a premium plugin you would have to shell out money even if you wish to try it on your website to gauge your needs.

What is RabbitLoader

RabbitLoader is an all-in-one pagespeed optimization plugin that uses a premium Content Delivery Network (CDN), caching, image optimization, lazy loading, and other techniques to reduce web page loading time for your WordPress website.

When you are using our RabbitLoader, you don’t need to use different plugins for caching,Image optimization, CDN or even minification. Everything that’s needed to optimize your website is done by RabbitLoader itself without you having to toggle through 10 different settings.

Another advantage of RabbitLoader over WP Rocket is the availability of a forever free version. So if your website is not yet receiving a lot of traffic, you can just use RabbitLoader for free and spend the money to get more traffic.

Major Differences Between WP Rocket and RabbitLoader

Now you have a basic idea about WP Rocket and RabbitLoader. Lets see the differences between WP Rocket and RabbitLoader. Here we are mentioning some key differences between these two plugins.

What are the Similarities Between WP Rocket and RabbitLoader

Performance Optimizer: 

Both optimization plugins, WP Rocket, and RabbitLoader can improve Core Web Vitals, address Google pagespeed Insights suggestions, and help you to achieve good pagespeed performance scores. Although the pagespeed score you can reach using these plugins would be different for each of them.

Browser Caching:

Caching can store static files like HTML files, CSS stylesheets, JavaScript files, media files, and images. It minimizes the work for the server, the server wouldn’t have to serve that content over and over and serve the web page for the users if you leverage browser caching.

For example, when you are visiting our website RabbitLoader.com, your browser will download the RabbitLoader logo in the cache. The next time you visit RabbitLoader.com, this logo is directly loaded from the cache. This is how you can save data per web page.

• WP Rocket and RabbitLoader, both can improve your website speed by generating HTML files so that in the future, users can access them quickly. It also stores static resources like CSS stylesheets, JavaScript, and image files in the user device’s local memory.

Premium CDN: 

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of interconnected servers that help to speed up a website’s loading time. It reduces the physical distance between the server and the user and proves the latency.

• Although there is a free CDNs present in WP Rocket, its effect on the latency is next to none as it has very few PoPs.

For a better experience, WP Rocket has a custom with more PoPs. Known as RocketCDN, It offers unlimited bandwidth.

• RabbitLoader has an integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN) with 300+ edge locations.CDN cache can save the version of your wordpress website and load this when the same user visits it. The CDN also saves the hosting resources.

WP Rocket vs RabbitLoader: Performance Comparison

We can make all the comparisons we want but as they say the proof is in the pussing, so let’s see how WP Rocket fares against RabbitLoader, to find out we would analyze a demo woocommerce website cellofy.shop in three different cases.

Once without any optimization plugin, then after installing WP Rocket & finally we would be testing it with RabbitLoader installed. 

Also, we will attach the video of the test along with the screenshots of the results.

Case 1- Checking website’s pagespeed without using any performance optimization plugins.

Let’s check the pagespeed performance score of cellofy.shop without plugging any performance optimization tools. 

As expected it didn’t do very well in the pageSpeed test and you managed to achieve a measly 36 for the mobile version and 50 for the desktop version.

Mobile Mode:

In mobile mode, the performance score is just 36. Which indicates this website fails the performance test for the mobile version. Which is not a good sign for any website, specially keeping the mobile first policy google in mind. 

Below are the pagespeed metrics which had a heavy impact on the website’s low pagespeed scores.

• First Contentful Paint (FCP) – 5.0s
• Large Contentful Paint (LCP) -5.8s
• Total Blocking Time (TBT) – 1440 ms

Desktop mode:

While the desktop division of the The pagespeed performance score is also not very high either, it looks far better than the mobile version. 

Below are the pagespeed metrics that had the biggest impact on its pagespeed score.

• First Contentful Paint (FCP) – 1.9s
• Large Contentful Paint (LCP) -2.4s
• Total Blocking Time (TBT) – 650 ms

Case 2- Let’s check the website’s pagespeed after installing WP Rocket

While installing Wp Rocket is like any other plugin in the wordpress ecosystem, you would need to “configure” it, go to each other individually & activate them.While it might give the user some satisfaction of them doing the optimization, it is nonetheless a time-consuming process.

But what’s the impact of WP Rocket on the pagespeed score?

            Mobile mode:

Well as far as the mobile version goes, it’s next to no improvement, not only that we can see the Total block time is surprisingly increased after using WP Rocket plugin. Not the best way to spend you 60 odd dollars.

Desktop mode:

However, we do see the value of the WP Rocket in the desktop version of the website. The optimized version of the website managed to achieve a respectable 78 on the pagespeed score.

We can see FCP, LCP & TBT all improving from their previous states to a somewhat respectable score.

See the test video :

Case 3 – Checking the website’s pagespeed after installing RabbitLoader

Finally we would install RabbitLoader after uninstalling WP Rocket of course, & check the performance of cellofy.shop, The website is checked within just 5 minutes of installing the plugin and here are the results.

Mobile mode:

Here, after installing RabbitLoader the mobile pagespeed score has improved drastically, while WP Rockets improved the score from 36 for the optimized version to just 37 RabbitLoader manages to bump up the pagespeed scores to a very respectable 82. 

The score improvement is the pagespeed test is the result of improvements made in,

• FCP ( From to 5.0 seconds to just 3.3 second)
• LCP ( From to 5.8 seconds to 3.6 seconds) and
• TBT ( From 1440ms to 40 ms)

Desktop mode:

Finally, for the desktop version, WP Rocket achieved a respectable 78 from the original score of just 50. RabbitLoader archived a near perfect 99 out of 100. So how did RabbitLoader achieve such an unrealistic looking, near perfect score? That too for the home page?

RabbitLoader has reduced the FCP from 1.9 seconds to just 0.6 seconds.While LCP came down from 2.4 seconds to just 0.7 seconds and the TBT became just 10 ms from 650 ms on the unoptimised website.

See the test video:

Checking the website’s pagespeed score table view: without any plugin, with WP Rocket, and with RabbitLoader plugin

Conclusion

If you are planning to optimize your website or improve the current optimization, now you have the information on your side to make a judgment call. 

If you have enough time on your hands maybe spend a day installing both WP Rocket & RabbitLoader on your website & see the differences in score yourself.

Maybe you are using WP Rocket for a long time, maybe it’s time you try RabbitLoader which can give you a bit more performance, that little bit of an edge that might become a deciding factor for the search engine to rank you higher or  lower than your competition.

FAQ:

Lighthouse Speed Test : 5 Simple Tips on How to Improve Your Website’s Performance

Google Lighthouse is a free tool that helps you analyze the quality of web pages on your website. It audits your pages for accessibility, performance, and SEO and recommends changes to improve them.

Let’s assume the Lighthouse is the speedometer of a car that not only shows the car’s speed but also shows suggestions to improve the speed. You can use the recommendations from the Lighthouse report to improve your website further.

What is Google Lighthouse?

The major focus of Lighthouse audits is Google’s Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals is a set of three metrics i.e. Google uses them to calculate the speed of the web page and overall user experience (UX).

Lighthouse uses six metrics to generate the performance score. These are

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP),
2. First Input Delay (FID),
3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), 
4. First Contentful Paint (FCP),
5. Interaction to Next Paint (INP), 
6. Time to First Byte (TTFB).

The good thing about Lighthouse is that it not only shows you a report on all the important Core Web Vitals information. It also gives you actionable insights in just a few seconds to improve several site aspects like web accessibility and SEO. 

It is very important to run a Lighthouse audit on your site to see specific performance weaknesses related to your site that negatively influence the user experience.

Unwrapping the Lighthouse Speed Test Report and Metrics

Lighthouse checks your website and assigns it a score across five various categories.

1. Performance Audit

In this audit, Lighthouse calculates how fast a web page loads and how quickly it becomes interactive.

It presents your performance for the five-speed metrics mentioned below:

• First Contentful Paint (FCP): FCP is a performance metric that calculates how fast a user can see the actual content on your page such as images, text, videos, and so on.
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): LCP calculates the time it takes for the largest and most important visible element to load. It could be an image, a block of test or even a video on the page.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): CLS calculates the shifts in the layout that take place during  the loading of the webpage, it calculates the stability & predictability of the elements within the webpage. 
• Speed Index (SI): Speed Index is a page load performance metric that displays how fast the contents of a page are visible to the users. It is the average time at which the visible sections of the page are shown.
• Total Blocking Time (TBT): It evaluates the page’s load responsiveness to user input. It is useful to remove your FID score in lab data. They both calculate different things i.e. user input and user interaction but by upgrading TBT you simply improve FID which is a Core Web Vitals. 

Lighthouse provides an overall performance score for all these metrics based on your page performance. The score should be anything between 0 to 100.

If the score is anything between 90 and 100 it means your page is effectively optimized for user experience. A score below 90 needs some improvement in your performance for which Lighthouse provides suggestions.

2. Accessibility Audit

Lighthouse’s accessibility test evaluates how well the users who use assistive technology are capable of using your website. It looks at elements including links and buttons to check if they are appropriately described.

The accessibility score connects to how usable your website is for all users, in all their diversity.

It also analyzes site images to check whether alt text is present or not. It is required for users with poor vision to understand what the image is all about while using a screen reader.

Like the performance report, the accessibility report also provides you with a score out of 100. It also provides recommendations to improve your overall accessibility.

3. Best Practices Audit

This audit checks whether your page is created on the latest standards of web development. Additionally, it conducts a brief audit of generally approved best practices for web development. Lighthouse examines whether:

• The page is free from all browser errors.
• If your website is using a secure connection, such as HTTPS
• The page allows users to paste passwords in the password section or allows the usage of password managers.
• If the page has a valid source map.
• The page developed a good user experience or UX by preventing geolocation and notification permission requests on page load.
• All JavaScript libraries are protected and free from any vulnerabilities and so on. 

All the above-mentioned audit factors provide you with a score out of 100. The report on best practices also highlights some particular elements that need your attention to improve the score.

4. SEO Audit

Lighthouse assesses the SEO of a website by considering elements such as structured data, meta tags, and headings. It checks if your page has valid structured data or not, whether your page is mobile-friendly, and so on. It then provides a score out of 100.

It gives suggestions to enhance the search engine visibility of your website which is essential to operate organic traffic.

5. Progressive Web App (PWA) Audit

The last section of the Lighthouse metrics is PWA. It checks whether the site meets the standard of Progressive Web App to provide an excellent user experience.

The PWA audit measures whether your web app is 

• Installable on various devices and contains features such as push notifications and offline functionality.
• Reliable and fast on mobile networks and provides offline functionality.
• PWA-optimized by configuring a custom splash screen, redirecting HTTP traffic to HTTPS, and more.

The test runs your website against these audit factors and represents one of the PWA badges. It also provides recommendations to improve the overall PWA performance.

How to Test Speed and Performance using Google Lighthouse

There are a few tools that can run a Lighthouse audit on the website. If you wish to avoid installing an extension or running a command, you need to use the web.dev or Chrome DevTools. Let’s take a look at the instructions for each one of them:

1. Chrome DevTools

To run a report in Chrome you need to go through these steps:

• First, you need to open Google Chrome in incognito mode.
• Then you have to navigate to the website you want to run the audit on.
• After that, you should Right Click anywhere on the page and then click Inspect.
• Then you should look for the tab called Lighthouse which seems invisible as it is hidden behind the arrows at the top of the developer tools section.
• As soon as you reach here you must click Generate Report to see the complete Lighthouse Audit. Please note that it may take a minute or two for the audit to show the report.

2. Pagespeed.Web.Dev

An easier way to audit a web page with Lighthouse is pagespeed.web.dev. It is a browser-based tool where you need to enter the URL of your website.

As soon as the audit is finished, Lighthouse presents you with a detailed report. Note that it does not provide two separate reports for desktop or mobile, so you can see only one analytics report. 

3. Chrome Extension

Another popular way to run an audit on the website is Chrome Extension. You need to install the Lighthouse Chrome Extension on your Chrome browser. After that, you should visit the web page you want to test. 

Open the Chrome Extension menu and click on the Lighthouse symbol. Click on Generate Report to perform the audit. After that, it presents you with a detailed report.

5 Simple Hacks to Improve Pagespeed Score in Google Lighthouse

There are various ways to improve your Lighthouse performance on your website. Now take a look at some of them to provide you a taste of how you can upgrade the Lighthouse metrics: 

1) Optimize Your Images

By compressing every photo you can optimize your images. Images are required to be responsive and scaled to the screen size. The images should have SEO-friendly titles, alt texts, and alt descriptions. 

Adding alt text and descriptions provides screen readers with an easy way to represent imagery for people with no vision. This performance connected them to a long list of audits completed for Lighthouse’s Accessibility score. 

They also give context to site crawlers. Thus, this optimization enhances both SEO and Accessibility scores.

It could be difficult if not impossible to manually optimize hundreds & thousands of images. You can automate the process by using any image optimizer similar to RabbitLoaderif you are on wordpress CMS.

2) Use Appropriate File Names

Filenames do not seem necessary but context is important for both accessibility and image optimization. 

You should use dashes instead of spaces. For instance- A-picture-of-an-island instead of a picture of an island. You should try to keep names that are appropriate to the imagery. 

3) Optimize Your LCP

To optimize your LCP score you have to shrink your video sizes. You should always be aware of the size of your background images.You would need to optimize your fonts completely.

Set-up page caching is also helpful in boosting your server response time remarkably and helps in improving the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). 

LCP presents a website’s loading time. It calculates how fast the web page renders its largest elements as well as text blocks and images.

It might become too messy & conflicting if you use a plugin or a tool for each of the optimization you need  hence you should try an all in one optimization tool like RabbitLoader.

It is a cache-based speed optimization plugin to improve the LCP score of your website. RabbitLoader reduces the time it takes for a site to load its largest element through compression and caching technologies. It ensures that the largest content element is quickly visible on the user’s screen.

4) Deffer Irrelevant CSS or JavaScript 

If you are facing difficulty in improving Total Blocking Time (TBT) and Time To Interactive (TTI), you need to check whether there is any irrelevant CSS or Javascript file available that is slowing down the rendering of the page.

RabbitLoader efficiently defers non-critical Javascript files, specifically those belonging to third-party services, and third-party plugins like chat widgets, pop-ups, analytics, and so on.

With the help of RabbitLoader, site owners look for better website performance, user engagement, and decreased page load times.

5) Reduce Unnecessary Plugins

On platforms like WordPress & many other CMS’s a large number of packages or plugins are available to improve the performance of your website, but as you keep installing the plugin to improve each aspect of performance they add up & start conflicting with each other & since you now have installed a lot of plugins those plugins would make the website even slower.

Instead of using one plugin for image optimization and one for caching, try RabbitLoader .You do not need several plugins for caching, image size reduction, CSS, HTML, and Javascript minification, compression, and so on. You just need to install RabbitLoader and it will optimize your website in a few minutes.

Final Thoughts 

Google Lighthouse provides operative insights to improve the user experience, accessibility, and overall performance. By recognizing the areas for improvement, you should evaluate your site for better user engagement, more successful online presence, and higher search rankings.

What Is The Largest Contentful Paint And How To Optimize to Pass the Core Web Vitals. 

The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is one of the 3 pillars of the Core Web Vitals. It can be optimized in two ways: either by implementing optimization techniques such as image, CSS, and JavaScript optimization, or using an all in one  performance optimization plugin  like RabbitLoader.

Prioritizing the user experience, Google have added the Largest Contentful Paint to measure a webpage’s initial loading time, Cumulative Layout Shifts (CLS) to quantify the page’s stability, and Interaction to Next Paint (INP) to analyze the website’s interactivity with users. 

Here we will explain the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in detail and how to optimize this to improve PageSpeed performance & pass the Core Web Vital test.   

What Is The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)?

The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) analyzes the time it takes to display the largest content of your website in the user’s browser. 

This performance metric is used to analyze a page’s initial loading time. A hero image, text blocks (such as headlines, and paragraphs), and video thumbnails can be considered as the largest contentful element.

A good LCP time can help you achieve a desirable PageSpeed scores, lower bounce rate, and higher Google rankings. 

What Is Considered An Ideal Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) Time?

If you want to be in a green zone in the PageSpeed insight test, your LCP time needs to be less than 2.5 seconds. An LCP score between 2.5 seconds and 4.0 seconds is considered moderate performance, and Google always suggests improving it.

If a user needs to wait more than 4.0 seconds, it’s categorized as a poor LCP performance.  

The Difference Between LCP And FCP

Although Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and First Contentful Paint (FCP) both analyze the initial loading time of a web page, there are some differences in their functionality. 

Where the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is used to measure the span of time it takes to render the largest elements (a hero image or text blocks) of a web page, the First Contentful Paint (FCP) calculates the time it takes to display a non-white canvas. 

The Reason Behind A Poor LCP Score

Several factors can affect the Largest Contentful paint (LCP). Let’s mention the most common reasons behind poor LCP performance.

How To Optimize LCP Performance? 

To improve your PageSpeed performance, you need to optimize the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) performance along with the other core web vital metrics. Let’s dive into the most effective optimization strategies to improve the LCP performance.  

Reduce The Initial Server Response Time

Using a browser and CDN caching mechanism can significantly reduce the initial server loading time by temporarily storing static resources like stylesheets, scripting and HTML files, and images in the browser cache and proxy server.     

Manually increasing a caching mechanism requires too much effort, especially if you are not from a technical background. However, using RabbitLoader, you can easily implement a browser caching mechanism on your website in a few minutes. 

On the other hand, when you use RabbitLoader, you don’t need to invest money for CDN. RabbitLoader reduces network latency through its in-built content delivery network, which has 300+ edge/proxy servers. 

Serve The Images In Next-Gen Format

Though a high-resolution image can make a website more appealing, it can also negatively affect its PageSpeed performance by increasing the page file size. Converting the images into next-gen formats such as WebP and AVIF can improve the website’s loading performance.

Manually converting images into next-gen formats one by one requires a lot of time and effort, especially when you have a large website or any e-commerce website. 

When you are using RabbitLoader, it converts your images into next-gen formats through its bulk image optimization feature. For more details, please read our Next-Gen Formats blog.

Add Lazy Loading

To defer the offscreen images, you need to implement lazy loading to them. By implementing lazy loading (known as on-demanding loading), you can instruct the browser to load only the images required for rendering the viewport instead of all the images when the webpage is loading for the first time. 

The remaining images will load when they are required, improving the LCP time.   

When optimizing your website’s PageSpeed performance with RabbitLoader, you don’t need to implement lazy loading separately. RabbitLoader implements the Lazy loading for below the fold images automatically & improves your LCP score. 

Optimize the CSS & JavaScript files

CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files are fundamental resources for your website. However, unoptimized CSS and JavaScript files can block the main thread and have a negative impact on the LCP of your website.

RabbitLoader optimizes the CSS & javascripts by reducing unused CSS and JavaScript, minifying the codes, and, most importantly, generating a separate critical CSS file that is unavoidable for achieving a good PageSpeed score, where most optimization tools lags behind.

Optimize LCP Performance With RabbitLoader 

As you can see, optimizing LCP performance can be challenging, especially when you have a large website or a non-technical background. However, RabbitLoader makes it very easy. With a few clicks, you can optimize your website’s LCP & other Core Web Vital  metrics.

Install RabbitLoader to optimize your website’s PageSpeed performance and provide your user with a fast-loading website. 

What Is Total Blocking Time (TBT) & How to Optimize It to Boost The PageSpeed Score?

You may have encountered the term Total Blocking Time (TBT) while analyzing your PageSpeed performance in Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. But what is Total Blocking Time?

Google added this Total Blocking Time (TBT) metric to its PageSpeed & lighthouse tests to analyze the span of time when the main thread is blocked and the user needs to wait to see the website’s content.

Google PageSpeed Insights considers TBT along with four other metrics to determine the PageSpeed score. 

Here, you’ll learn everything you need to know about Total Blocking Time (TBT) and how you can easily optimize your TBT performance by using RabbitLoader without needing coding skills. 

What Is Total Blocking Time (TBT)?

Total Blocking Time (TBT) accounts for 30% of the overall Google PSI score. This performance metric is used to analyze the load responsiveness of a website. In simple words, TBT measures the span of time, a long task (which takes more than 50 ms ) blocks the main thread and negatively affects your page’s usability. 

Let’s understand TBT with an example. Assume, there are a total of 4 tasks in which task 1 takes 150 ms, task 2 takes 30 ms, task 3 needs 100 ms, and finally, task 4 requires 350 ms.The TBT for these 4 tasks combines would be 450 ms (100+50+300).

How To Measure Total Blocking Time?

You already understand how Total Blocking Time is calculated. Here we will mention the helpful tools to measure the Total Blocking Time. There are several tools available to measure TBT. Let’s discuss the two most popular online tools to measure it.

Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights considers 5 performance metrics to determine the PageSpeed score. Among these 5 metrics, TBT is one of them. To know how to measure it in Google PageSpeed Insights, read our PageSpeed Insights blog.

GTmetrix 

GTmetrix is the best alternative tool for measuring PageSpeed performance. Its advantage over Google PSI is that it allows customizing the test location and device. For more details, read our post on GTmetrix.  

What Is An Ideal Total Blocking Time?

In order to categorize the performance of Total Blocking Time (TBT), google sets some boundary values. To be in a green zone, your Total blocking Time should be less than 300 ms for the whole page Let’s explore the criteria.

The Reason Behind A High Total Blocking Time

Before discussing the solution, it’s important to know the reason behind a high TBT. Let’s explore the most common causes that can inflate the Total Blocking Time (TBT).

• A high JavaScript execution time due to the unoptimized JavaScript files
• An unoptimized  CSS file
• Using a huge number of third-party scripts
• A high main thread work. 
• An excessive DOM size. 

Optimize TBT With RabbitLoader

Optimizing Total Blocking Time can be challenging as it requires extensive modification of resource files such as stylesheets, HTML, and JavaScript files. To prevent these technical aspects, you can install RabbitLoader. Let’s see how RabbitLoader optimizes your TBT.

Compress Your Resource Files

Compressing is a method for easily reducing the size of your resource file by minimizing the redundancy in your coding file. The most popular two types of compression are GZIP and Brotli.

The most traditional compression method is used in GZIP, whereas the Brotli uses a modern algorithm. 

RabbbitLoader uses the Brotli compression method and compresses your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, resulting in significant improvement of The Total blocking Time performance.  

Minifying JavaScript And CSS Files

When it comes to improving the TBT performance, minification of JavaScript files and CSS stylesheets is one of the unavoidable optimization strategies. By removing white spaces and unnecessary comments from your CSS and JS files, you can easily reduce the total file size.   

Doing this manually can be a daunting task for a large website, by just installing RabbitLoader, you can easily reduce the file size by minifying your JS and CSS files without any tweaks.

Optimize Your CSS Files

Although a CSS file’s aesthetic contribution is huge in a website’s design, an unoptimized CSS can negatively affect the performance of TBT metrics, leading to a slow loading speed. 

There are two ways to optimize your CSS files: reducing the unused CSS and generating critical CSS. When you use RabbitLoader, it will optimize your CSS stylesheets by identifying and reducing the unused CSS and creating a file for your critical CSS. For more details, on how CSs is optimized by RabbitLoader you can read the Reduce Unused CSS blog and the Critical CSS blog. 

Optimize JavaScript Files 

JavaScript optimization is another process that can significantly reduce the TBT and mitigate the Google PageSpeed warning “Reduce JavaScript Execution time”. Some techniques are involved in JavaScript Optimization which includes:

• Add a defer attribute in the HTML file for each non-critical JavaScript function.
• Code splitting.
• Minifying and compressing JavaScript files. 

When you use RabbitLoader for other optimization purposes, you don’t need to worry about each optimization technique. RabbitLoader will look after your JavaScript optimization among other optimization techniques needed for a lightning fast website. 

Conclusion 

The Total Blocking Time (TBT) is one of the most important performance metrics that holds 30% weightage of the overall PageSpeed score in Google PSI. To increase user engagement on your website, you need to optimize the performance of TBT along with the other performance metrics. 

Optimize your WordPress, Shopify, Php or Laravel websites with just a few clicks, improve their PageSpeed performance in just 5 minutes by  installing RabbitLoader.