According to a study, website visitors are more likely to exit a page if they experience a slow loading time. The probability of such occurrence increases by 100% if the time it takes to load a page goes from one second to six seconds. As a result, you lose potential customers. That’s why it’s important to prioritize website speed to optimize your performance and increase organic traffic.
But if you’re wondering how to go about it, the answer is simple: use Google PageSpeed Insights.
What is Google PageSpeed Insights?
PageSpeed Insights (PSI) provides both lab data and field data on your website's performance on different devices such as mobile and desktop. On the one hand, lab data collects performance data in a fixed environment preset on a specific device and connection settings. Because of this, lab data can offer reproducible results. It can also identify and solve performance problems through its debugging capabilities.
On the other hand, field data reports on the real-world and real-time user experience. Although this works on a limited set of metrics, it can still measure your website's performance in relation to core web vitals to provide beneficial insights to improve your website.
Other Elements of PageSpeed Insights
Aside from field and lab data, PageSpeed Insights also includes other elements contributing to your website performance report. These include:
1. Audits
PSI uses Lighthouse, an automated tool used for enhancing the overall quality of web pages. It provides audits to inspect your website’s accessibility, performance, SEO compatibility, and so much more. This tool segregates audits into three main sections.
- Opportunities: The first section provides practical suggestions to improve your website’s performance. Moreover, each suggestion shows you how much faster your page will run once the enhancement has been implemented.
- Diagnostics: The second section gives you more information about how your page can follow web development best practices. With this information, you can further strengthen your overall performance.
- Passed Audits: While the first two sections show you how your page can be improved, the last section tells you what your page has accomplished.
2. Data Classification
PSI classifies the field data according to three classifications, mainly good, needs improvement, and poor. Using the metric data collected from your website's core web vitals, it can gauge the quality and speed of your page and present a score. Each core web vital follows a standard, which goes as follows:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): A good rating for LCP is anywhere between 0 to 2,500ms. 2,500ms to 4,000ms needs improvement, and any number above 4000ms is poor.
- First Input Delay (FID): For FID, to get a good rating, your page needs to get a number between 0 and 100ms. 100ms to 300ms needs improvement, and any number over 300ms is deemed poor.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Lastly, a good rating for CLS ranges from 0 to 0.1. 0.1 to 0.25 needs improvement and any number over 0.25 is poor.
3. Performance score
PageSpeed Insights summarizes the data collected from all these components and provides a score at the top of the report. Any good score ranges from 90 and above. If your website gets a score between 50 and 90, it means it needs improvement. Lastly, any score below 50 is poor.
How can you Improve your Score?
Once you run PageSpeed Insights and get an initially low score, you can try these recommended actions and best practices to address commonly found issues.
- Avoid Redirects: Multiple redirects require browsers to produce additional HTTP links, resulting in slow page load. Avoiding this altogether can boost page speed.
- Use Content Delivery Network: this network distributes content to surrounding proxy servers, resulting in high availability and optimized performance. Using CDN enables your website to load and deliver content faster.
- Optimize Image Size: Bigger image size means longer loading time. To increase website speed, you need to optimize the size by compressing the image.
Conclusion
Optimizing website speed is one step to improve your search engine ranking. Since SEO Singapore considers content and efficiency in delivery, your website's quality is of utmost importance. With PageSpeed Insights, you can identify the problem and enforce the necessary solutions to enhance speed and user experience.
Find an SEO agency Singapore-wide to help you develop a high-speed and high-quality website.