6 Efficient Ways to Improve Your Google PSI Scores

by ddos ·

When building your website, you must pay attention to your website’s speed and performance. Otherwise, your visitors may decide to leave and look for your competitors.

Website performance plays a major role in your website’s success.

To achieve that success, you need to make sure you measure, optimize and monitor your site’s speed and performance. The easiest way you can do this is by using Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI).

What Is Google PageSpeed Insights?

PageSpeed Insights is a web performance analysis tool that can help you optimize your website. It is developed by Google, it’s very simple to use, and it’s free, which gives you plenty of opportunities to experiment with it.

If the tool shows a score between 90 and 100, it means that your website has a good loading speed. However, if you achieve a lower score, it means you need to take action to improve your website performance.

Here are a few tips and tricks on how to improve your Google PageSpeed Insights Score.

1. Optimize Your Images

One of the most frequent reasons your website might be slow is the images you use.

Considering that images take up a lot of space on your website, you need to ensure that you use optimized images that do not have a negative impact on your site’s performance.

By using the following measures, you can easily optimize your images:

  • Use image formats like PNG or JPG as these can reduce loading time
  • Size up images to display size instead of using larger versions. That’s because the browser will first have to download a larger image and then display a smaller one, which increases the loading time.
  • Use different tools to compress images without reducing the quality. It will take you much less time to download compressed images than heavier images.

2. Reduce Unused JavaScript and CSS

If you are shipping unused code in web development, this may cause problems to your site. One way to solve this problem is to reduce the number of plugins you use in WordPress.

Plugins add extraneous JS/CSS code to the web pages. On top of this, you can also use code coverage in Chrome DevTools, as this would help you determine the URL of problematic stylesheets or scripts.

Plus, try to minify your CSS, JS, and HTML code. By minifying, we mean removing extra space and syntax to compress the code, allowing you to further reduce bandwidth usage and load times.

There are two more tools you can use minify code automatically in WordPress — Autoptimize and WP Rocket. If you are using another custom-built website or another CMS, you can use tools like CSS Minifier and JavaScript Minifier to minify the code manually.

If you need more time to focus on things that matter, try reaching out to a New York website design company that can help you reduce JS and CSS.

3. Leverage Browser Caching

When obtaining resources using the net, many cycles between the server and the client are launched, which can further slow down the loading time.

You can eliminate this slow and expensive process by using a caching policy. With this policy, you will enable clients to figure out when and if they can use responses from the past.

Here are a few questions you may ask yourself when using one of these policies:

  • Can you cache the source?
  • Who can do it?
  • How can it be efficiently revalidated?

You may also consider using Cache-Control or ETags to enable efficient revalidation.

4. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Since more than 70% of people use mobile phones globally today, it is imperative to create a mobile-friendly website.

If you make sure you optimize your website to be mobile-friendly, you are more likely to reach Google PageSpeed Insights scores of 100 out of 100.

On the other hand, you can search for top mobile app development companies to help you achieve your goal and expand your reach by getting a mobile app.

5. Upgrade Your Host

One of the common reasons why you may not achieve a high score on your Google PageSpeed Insights is a bad Server Response Time. This refers to the period it takes for the request to hit your server and the data to come back.

Some of the best servers can achieve a response time of 0.2 seconds. On the other hand, slower servers can do this in 2 seconds or more.

So, if you are ready to invest some money in your site speed and performance, try upgrading your host. For instance, try using BigScoots, as it will allow you to have a response time on the order of 0.25 to 0.30 seconds.

6. Do Away with Redirects

If you are making multiple redirects, you will cause the browser to add more HTTP requests, meaning that it will significantly slow down the web pages and increase loading time.

So, if you focus on a responsive design for web pages and avoid redirects completely, this will definitely improve your user experience

To Wrap Up

Hopefully, by using these techniques, you will achieve a 100/100 Google PageSpeed Insights score. But keep in mind that a good PSI score does not reflect your loading time precisely.

However, keep incorporating new techniques and making necessary changes to your website. You will achieve a great website performance that will surely help you get ahead of your competition.