Intro
What is web performance?
What is page speed?
How do I know the loading speed of my website?
How does the speed of my website impact my SEO?
When we create our new website, here are some questions we don’t ask ourselves enough. The same goes when we decide to optimize our website to be more easily found on Google.
But first let us focus on “The Google Page Speed”.
What is Google Page Speed Insight?
“Google Pagespeed Insights is a performance diagnostic tool provided by Google. This is a must-have tool if you’re doing search engine optimization. It’s 100% free.”
Cfr. https://premiersurgoogle.ca/optimisation-google-pagespeed.php
If we want to know the performance of our website, then we can use this tool from Google which can be found at the following link:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=fr
Through this tool, we will have a free website performance analysis with the following 3 points:
- Our Page Speed Score
- The loading speed of our website (desktop & mobile)
- Suggestions for optimizing our website for Page Speed
The relationship between Pagespeed and SEO
Does the speed at which my website loads impact my SEO?
Yes.
The speed or performance of the website is part of what is called Off Page SEO.
Let’s imagine a user launches a Google search with keywords relevant to our domain and referenced on our website.
The Google SERP (Search Engine Result Page) will then come back to us with the most relevant results.
To improve the user experience, Google will do everything to return the results as soon as possible. And in the same perspective, the user experience will be even more optimal if the most relevant pages are also the fastest.
That’s why for two sites with the same content, performance will also be an additional selection factor for the search tool. And Google always gives priority to sites that load quickly.
Another point in favour of performance: the better our website performs, the faster the Google bot will index it, the faster our new content will be available on Google.
So where can we find our Page Speed Insight or PSI?
The PSI is therefore one of the most important criteria for our Google ranking. But when we calculate it, we notice that the score can fluctuate for each query. This is simply due to the fact that for each test the conditions may be different: network quality, scripts used, third party ads, …
So is the page speed score really important to us?
- Yes, because it will determine our Google ranking.
- No, because it is never fixed.
However, if we should not take the PSI at face value, it invites us to think and plan our actions to optimize our website performance and thus reduce its loading time. And depending on the severity of the diagnosis and the opportunities found, we can take action and optimize our website.
“These suggestions may help your page load faster. However, they have no direct impact on the performance score.”
Note that:
If Google has the PageSpeed Insights to analyze the loading speed of our website, they also offer us a platform dedicated solely to mobile websites :
Mobile: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/testmysite/
Desktop: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=fr
Here are 6 easy tips to implement today to reduce your loading time
1. Minify CSS
CSS minification is the procedure to remove redundant data in our CSS files (duplicate code, comments in the document, formatting, inactive codes and functions, … ).
It is important to minimize our CSS, HTML and JS files:
2. Minify JavaScript
See Minify CSS
3. Minify HTML
See Minify CSS
4. Activate browser caching
Caching consists of saving a copy of our website locally on the visitor’s computer. Therefore, when the user visits our website next time, the browser will be able to respond to the request by first loading the local copy without having to use the web server. Each resource will have to specify in turn at what interval it will refresh the cache with a new copy.
We will then be able to load our website much faster than when we don’t use caching.
5. Defer offscreen images
When we open a web page, we are then well aware that it is impossible to display all the information on our screen without scrolling down.
In this invisible content we also find images.
By delaying the loading of the “invisible” images, we allow the browser to display the page much faster because the invisible parts are simply not loaded.
This process is also called “Lazy Loading”.
6. Properly size images
The heaviest files found on our website, apart from the videos stored on our servers, are the photos. And most of the time these are poorly optimized for an ideal performance of our web page.
By wanting to have the photo in the best possible quality, we tend to upload photos that are much too large. This will inevitably reduce the speed of our website, for which Google will penalize us.
What can we do about it?
Simple…
Adjust the size of the images on our site for an optimal rendering and performance.
Conclusion
The Google PageSpeed Insights is a very important test to pass to your site, but we also know right now that this score is not an end-goal in itself.
The most important parts of the Google PageSpeed Insight are as follows:
- Our PageSpeed Score
- The loading speed of our website (desktop & mobile)
- Suggestions for optimizing our website for Page Speed
When we use this tool correctly, we will be able to find problem areas on our website and solve them. This way we will be able to decrease the loading speed and have a better website for the users.