Achieve a Perfect Google Page Speed Score with This 8-Step Guide

Don’t let your customers get away! According to Google, visitors who experience a load time of seven seconds or more are 113% more likely to bounce off a page! (https://think.storage.googleapis.com/docs/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks.pdf).

If you’re working hard on SEO strategies, don’t ignore this since a low page speed could allow another site to get ahead of you on the search engine results page (SERPS). To ensure that your website has a proper load speed, follow this 8-step Guide:

1. Pause. Take a deep breath. Understand where you’re lagging.

• Content Management Systems or CMSs are usually loaded with in-built software tools or plugins that can help to detect the reason behind lags or delays in loading time
• The most important step is to resolve the issue ASAP
• If you’re not sure about which tool to go for, you can always opt for free tools like,
• Google’s Page Speed Insights, is one among the best guides out there!
• Some of the most popular and commonly-used tools are: Website Grader, GTM Metrix, KeyCDN Website Speed Test and Pingdom!

  2. Compress your images.

  

• Large, uncompressed images are usually the underlying reason for slow page speeds
• Google developers suggest the image should as small as you can before losing crispness, and some of the hosts indicated that you should aim for files under 200KB
• Use Squoosh.app and Compress.io to compress images or you can also use Photoshop.
• Make sure to crop or re-size an image prior to uploading on the website, because your file size is the size of the actual image you uploaded

3. Shrink your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code.

• Google developers suggest removing useless language, notes and spaces that are generally left out or forgotten when a page is being created or updated

4. Eliminate render-blocking elements.

• Ensure that you prioritise your code so your main content comes first above the fold
• This is to prevent less important elements like sidebars or banners from loading before the main content
  
  5. Accelerate your mobile speed.
  

• In recent years, more than half of the google searches are done on mobile devices. —Which means a mobile-optimized site is important for any user to access
• In fact, Google rewards mobile-optimized sites.
• Apart from High SERPS or Search Engine Results Pages, Google will also give you a higher page speed score — and possibly a higher ranking — if your mobile site loads quickly.

6. Try to avoid or minimise page redirects.

• A redirect is a function that will automatically be directed to one or more different locations, before they hit their desired webpage
• You should only use redirects when very necessary because they affect your page speed by eating into valuable time

7. Improve your server response times.

• According to Google (https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/Server), a website’s response time should not exceed 200 milliseconds
• This is mainly because, it will lead to different issues like a “502 Gateway error”
• Using servers from a host company such as GoDaddy or contacting a knowledgeable representative might also help you determine and solve the problem

8. Use a content delivery network.

• A content delivery network or CDN can store browser cache of your website and load it quickly for visitors around the globe
• If there are website visitors from different geographies, pages will be loaded from nearby CDN servers
• It helps prevent low loading speeds for visitors who are far away

If you want to learn more about how Google indexes pages, head on over to this blog!