Improving Google PageSpeed Insights: 7 Critical Factors to Consider

Discover the 7 critical factors for better Google PageSpeed Insights that will improve your website’s performance, user experience, and search engine rankings. Learn how to leverage these factors to rank higher and attract more organic traffic.

In this post, I will share 7 critical factors for better Google Page Speed that can help you achieve your goal of getting a good ranking in Google Search.

Google PageSpeed Insights is a tool that gives website owners real-time analysis of their site’s performance. It generates reports and suggestions for improvements. This article helps you improve your PageSpeed test results by identifying 7 key slowness-related factors.

Google PageSpeed Insights can reveal critical insights into improving your website performance and lowering your bounce rate. Learn how Google PageSpeed Insights works and the essential factors for better results.

In today’s competitive online landscape, having a fast-loading website is more important than ever. Google’s Page Speed has become a significant ranking factor for websites, making it crucial for businesses to optimize their performance. This article will explore the 7 critical factors for better Google Page Speed and how they impact your website’s performance, user experience, and search engine rankings. Implementing these techniques will improve your website’s speed, ensuring a seamless experience for desktop and mobile users.

Unlocking the Power of Google PageSpeed Insights

In today’s digital landscape, website speed has become crucial for online success. Google’s PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is an invaluable tool designed to help you improve the performance of your website. By providing a PageSpeed Insights score (ranging from 0 to 100), this tool evaluates the speed of your website on both mobile and desktop devices. The PSI score is based on various speed metrics, such as time to first byte and page size, which can help you identify speed issues and optimize your website for a better user experience. With Google Analytics integration, you can easily track the impact of your improvements, ensuring a seamless performance across all devices.

Optimizing Your Website with PageSpeed Insights

Using PageSpeed Insights to analyze your website is simple yet powerful. By inputting your website’s URL, you receive a detailed report highlighting improvement areas. The speed test results include an overall score, core web vitals assessment, and specific recommendations to help improve your website’s performance. Additionally, the tool focuses on mobile speed, increasing users’ access to the internet through their smartphones. By implementing the suggested changes, such as reducing page size and addressing slow page loading times, you can improve your PageSpeed score, enhancing user experience and website performance.

Achieving the Perfect PageSpeed Score

While striving for a perfect PageSpeed Insights score (100) is an admirable goal, it’s essential to remember that web design and performance should balance functionality, aesthetics, and speed. You can significantly boost your website’s performance by focusing on the most critical speed metrics and implementing Google’s recommended improvements. Utilizing progressive web apps, optimizing page content, and regularly monitoring your site with the PageSpeed Insights tool can help you maintain a competitive edge in the ever-evolving digital world. Remember, a faster website delights users and contributes to higher search engine rankings and improved online visibility.

7 Critical Factors for Better Google PageSpeed Insights

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, website speed is essential for providing an exceptional user experience and achieving optimal search engine rankings. This table showcases the top 7 critical factors significantly impacting Google PageSpeed. Each factor includes a concise analysis, a rating based on importance (1-10), and relevant research studies for a deeper understanding.

By addressing these factors effectively, website owners can drastically enhance their site’s loading speed, improving user satisfaction, higher search engine rankings, and increasing conversion rates. Gaining insight into and optimizing these factors is crucial for webmasters looking to provide their audience with a fast and efficient browsing experience.

Critical Factor	Analysis	Rating	Related Research Topic
1. Minify HTML, CSS, JS	Reducing file sizes by removing unnecessary characters & white spaces	9	Web performance optimization studies
2. Image Optimization	Compressing images without losing quality for faster page loads	8	Image compression studies
3. Browser Caching	Storing static files locally to reduce server requests	7	Browser caching impact on load time
4. Reduce Server Response	Optimizing server configuration & reducing bottlenecks	6	Time-to-first-byte (TTFB) studies
5. CDN (Content Delivery Network)	Distributing content through a network of servers for faster delivery	5	CDN performance impact studies
6. Optimize CSS Delivery	Removing render-blocking CSS and inlining critical CSS	4	CSS optimization & render-blocking studies
7. Lazy Loading	Loading only the content that’s visible to the user	3	Lazy loading impact on performance

1. Optimize Image Sizes and Compression

One of the most significant factors affecting your website’s load speed is the size of the images used. Large file sizes can slow down your site, resulting in a poor user experience and lower search engine rankings. To optimize your images, use lossless image compression for high-quality content and lossy compression for faster loading times. This will reduce the original size of your images without sacrificing quality, improving your site’s overall performance.

2. Implement Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

Content Delivery Networks are servers distributed across the globe that help deliver internet content to users more quickly. By using a CDN, you can reduce the load on your origin server and ensure that your content is delivered to users from the nearest server, resulting in a faster user experience.

3. Leverage Browser Caching

Browser caching is a technique that allows browsers to store a copy of your website’s files on the user’s device for faster load times during future visits. By leveraging browser caching, you can reduce the number of browser requests and improve your site’s overall performance.

4. Optimize Server Response Time

The server response time, or the time it takes for your server to process and deliver a requested page, is a crucial factor in your site’s load speed. To optimize server response time, ensure that your hosting server has enough processing power and uptime, and consider upgrading to a more powerful server if necessary.

5. Optimize for Mobile Devices

With increasing numbers of users accessing websites from mobile devices, ensuring your site is optimized for mobile performance is essential. Implement responsive design, leverage lazy loading, and use mobile-friendly plugins to provide a seamless mobile experience for your users.

6. Minimize Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can negatively impact your site’s performance and search engine rankings. To avoid this issue, ensure that each piece of content on your site is unique and high-quality, and use canonical tags to indicate the preferred page version when necessary.

7. Improve Internal Linking Structure

A well-structured internal linking system can improve your site’s user experience and search engine rankings. By linking related content and using anchor text naturally, you can help users navigate your site more efficiently and improve your site’s overall search visibility.

Is your web page load time too high?

Have you recently run a Google PageSpeed test and have received unsatisfactory results? Have you improved your web page speed, but it’s still not fast enough for the Google PageSpeed test results? Chances are, you need to consider some performance factors that are overlooked by many. 

Many online marketing experts agree that a page speed test result of 10 seconds or less is ideal. But what if you get a result closer to 20 or 30 seconds for your website? 

A slow website can hurt your customer experience, rankings, and bounce rate. If users feel that the site is slower than it should be, they will click away.  To help prevent this, most search engines use a Page Speed tool to test any website’s speed. 

Whether you’ve experienced the vitality of a blazing-fast WordPress website or your content starts to resemble molasses, something is slowing it down. Whatever the case, bad page load speed can hamper a user experience and often search engine optimization. But how do you address these issues? The key is to learn where to look for opportunities and then take action to improve them. As solutions like Google PageSpeed Insights continue to improve, sites become more complex, and specific problems repeatedly pop up. 

Google’s PageSpeed Insights is an excellent tool for diagnosing and reporting web page performance issues. It’s easy to use and free! 

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is one of the Core Web Vitals

Site Load Time is a performance indicator measuring a web page’s load time. We consider Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) to be a more reliable, accurate, and useful metric. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a metric that can measure how quickly the browser can paint to the screen. 

Most websites have huge load time, so Google ranks these websites lower than websites with loading time below 2.5 seconds. 

The Largest Contentful Paint is essential to monitor the time it takes for the browser to display any part of your page’s visible content. This metric is calculated as the time between network requests for visible content and should be less than 2.5 seconds or above ten seconds. 

While performance is the primary determinant, it is critical to consider additional metrics to ensure the page has sufficient content and features to provide a good user experience. While ensuring that the Core Web Vitals are met, LCP affects how fast external JavaScripts can load on a page. It should be noted that the median value is used since distributions may vary greatly depending on the data set. 

Contentful is the best CMS for structured data and apps

Largest Contentful Paint is the algorithm’s name in new browsers, determining when a user has started interacting with a page. When the Paint occurs faster, it leads to a better user experience and possibly lower bounce rates. 

Contentful is the best CMS for structured data and apps. It is a modern CMS built on a flexible API-first architecture designed to empower developers. Contentful has the largest LCP score among CMSs, under 2 seconds. Thousands of leading brands, including Nike, BBC, and Le Monde use it. 

Contentful Paint indicates how much of the main content of a page is visible without having to run any JavaScript. For applications that load external data dynamically, Contentful Paint shows where the primary content stops and dynamic data begins. When Contentful Paint is greater than zero, at least part of the primary content has been painted. 

First Input Display (FID) is a part of Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics that collectively provides critical insights into the user experience. These include page load performance (FID), first Paint, first contentful Paint, DOM ready, onLoad, and interactive time. These metrics should be collected via JavaScript or other tools. Managing these in a single, consistent way gives you a better picture of the overall page load experience. 

FID is an HTTP request time that displays the words “First Input Delay.” The sum of processing time before the input events (mouse, keyboard, and others) is dispatched to the application. The lower this number is, the less latency you have in your application and the better user experience you achieve. 

Successful interactions between users and digital products demand near-zero latency between “click” and response. IBM’s First Input Delay (FID) is the latency between a user pressing a key and system response, vital to all aspects of our daily commerce, communication, and customer services. 

Your app must be interactive within 100 milliseconds for a good user experience. You can analyze the interaction time by testing your app on the MobileFirst playground. 

Interactivity details the interaction of user input and display. It emphasizes the speed at which the application responds to user input. If the response time is good, it will provide a positive user experience. A response that takes over 100 milliseconds is noticeable and usually annoying to users, so page performance should be improved if possible. 

The process of interactivity on a website is not just about when you can click but also when the web page should display it. Making a user wait for information is very important and sometimes frustrates users. A delayed response time of 4 seconds is often considered 1 second more than most users would tolerate. 

Visual Stability – Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Visual Stability is a core component of the Core Web Vitals. It, along with other core Web Vitals components, is used for measuring the stability and responsiveness of your web page as seen by its visitors. Visual Stability measures the degree to which objects on a page remain stable concerning each other over time. A high value indicates that the elements on a web page are moving relative to each other; they have a shift in position that is visually perceptible. A low value indicates good visual Stability (a low CLS).

In an effort to create a highly liquid, visually stable layout. The visual stability metric is defined as the area encompassed by all shifting layout boxes. Visual Stability and metrics like Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and Loss of Positive Structure (LOPS) are essential to the candidate’s web design’s overall score. Being at the center of your users’ attention, your website’s header is one of the most important components for creating visual Stability. 

Visual Stability is a score that is part of Core Web Vitals

Visual Stability measures how well text and objects can be recognized within their container. For example, on the page or in a picture frame. This new test is part of a suite of speed tests for mobile; it was introduced to help developers understand if the layouts of their pages are stable under common real-world visual conditions. 

The Visual Stability module provides a view of the cumulative layout shift for linked data sources. A score of less than 0.1 is ideal. A value above 0.2 indicates that the incremental layout shift can interfere with cognitive perception and may cause user problems. 

Keep visual structure that’s logical and consistent when you use Visual Stability from Core Web Vitals. With Visual Stability, you can keep your layout intact, increasing customer trust and confidence in your site. 

Your website must be Mobile Friendly

Over 50% of Google searches originate from mobile devices. If your website isn’t responsive and adjusts to every dimension, it will suffer in the rankings. 

If you are not mobile-friendly, you may lose a lot of potential customers. It’s time to be Mobile Friendly, which is now easier than ever with the mobile-friendly update! 

With over 50% of Google searches originating from smartphones, responsive design is more critical than ever. Responsiveness helps with SEO and usability, which are vital parts to consider when creating a website accessible to everyone. Unlike responsive design, responsive coding (adaptive or fluid coding) makes a more customized, unique approach for each device regarding your site’s layout. 

If you have an older website, then the chances are that it doesn’t. Therefore, ensuring your site has a responsive design is vital so everyone can easily access your information. Although Google introduced an algorithm update to help search results become mobile-friendly, you will still rank better if you do nothing but adjust your site to be mobile-friendly. 

With the number of searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo! handheld devices increasing daily, creating a mobile-friendly website for your patients is essential. With mobile traffic surpassing desktop visits, you can’t afford to have a site that perfectly fits smartphones. An increased number of people accessing the Web from mobile means that more people are likely to visit your dental office website when they search or browse via their phone. 

Safe website, malicious free

Combining fast speeds with safety, Google Safe Browsing reports your website’s status based on the site’s operators and crawlers that regularly search the Web for malicious content. Learn how to improve your Google Page Speed results. 

Google Page Speed is the name of a Google service used to determine how quickly a website loads. Google PageSpeed test results measure how fast your website responds to commands input by the user. Webmasters often run these tests to troubleshoot performance issues with websites. This tool allows for a list of results and recommendations on how to improve your website’s performance. Google provides recommendations for every result in the form of an individual section outlined below. 

We offer the tools and insights to improve your website’s load performance and provide users with a positive experience. This include: 

 Your website’s overall page load time is significantly affected by 3 main factors:

• elements that block page rendering,
• too many redirects, and
• DNS errors.

Our Google Page Speed test checks multiple URL examples for these issues.

Let your pages load faster – quicker page load times can benefit your customers. Google’s PageSpeed Insights looks at how well a website loads on a desktop and how it performs on mobile devices. Based on the technology recommendations, we’ll suggest quick wins that you can implement straight away to improve your score. If you have a website already, then now is the time to make any changes before Google changes the algorithm, affecting your ranking performance in organic search. 

Site speed significantly impacts bounce rates, rankings, and conversions. This article aims to increase awareness that site speed matters for SEO and boost site speed test scores by 7% or more using best practices. 

HTTPS – Website Encryption

Your site’s encryption, data integrity, and authentication are the first things a search engine will check when visiting your website. HTTPS provides both website security and speed improvement features.

Encrypting sensitive data on your site prevents attackers from stealing information or tampering with assets. HTTPS also helps Google establish that your site’s data is safe and authentic by satisfying our Encryption, Data Integrity, and Authentication requirements. 

Encryption, data integrity, and authentication are critical factors in how well Google checks your website. Using HTTPS helps keep your site secure and searchable. 

When you run a Website Speed Test, Google will check for your site’s HTTPS implementation. If Google finds an HTTPS implementation, that opens the door to stronger encryption (http vs. https) and stronger trust for your website. To improve your SEO and speed score, look at this informative guide for 7 Key Factors For Better Google Page Speed Test Results. 

Our quick guidelines will help get your pages encrypted quickly — all without having to dig through the complex settings of your web host. We recommend a CDN and that the Googlebot-Mobile test be configured on your pages. 

As a part of Google’s latest update for mobile search, HTTPS has become a ranking signal. If your site is on HTTP and you want to get into the Top 10 SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), you must be on HTTPS. 

Google Page Speed is a tool Google provides to analyze your site for performance and speed. HTTPS/SSL certificate installation is the simplest change you can make to improve your Google Page Speed results. This article covers what HTTPS is, the benefits of implementing it on your site, and how to do so effectively. 

Intrusive pop-ups or banners ruin the user experience

Google is placing more importance on your mobile-friendly site and is actively penalizing sites that are not. We want to help, and Google wants us all to make great sites.  

The Article Wizard helps you reduce your bounce rate and get a better Google Page Speed score. Remove those annoying pop-ups, load webpages in the background, and use off-screen navigation to keep your site from displaying unwanted content. 

To determine your Google PageSpeed score, Google runs a test against different Web page elements. These tests are also part of the indexing process and are necessary to ensure that pages get adequately ranked in Google search results.  

Google Page Speed, test results score, is based on 7 factors, including proper optimization of your header connection, keeping Javascript and CSS out of the header, minifying your HTML code, using vector graphics where possible (like logos), ETags, and more. Here are some tips to help you get a better Page Speed test result. 

CSS & JavaScript – Too much CSS or JavaScript can slow down page load time. Optimizer tools are available that help you remove excess code. 

Pages that take too long to load are marked as slow by Google. One of the contributing factors to Page Speed is having a low level of compression for your images, which reduces file sizes and load times. You can also reduce your page weight significantly by reducing unwanted scripts deleting unnecessary comments and formatting code.

FAQs

How does Google PageSpeed Insights work?

Answer:

Google PageSpeed Insights analyzes web pages and provides suggestions to make them faster and more optimized.

What is a good PageSpeed score?

Answer:

A good PageSpeed score is typically above 90, but it’s important to focus on improving user experience rather than just the score.

How can I improve my PageSpeed score?

Answer:

To improve your PageSpeed score, you can optimize images, minify CSS and JavaScript, enable caching, and use a content delivery network (CDN).

Does PageSpeed Insights affect SEO?

Answer:

Yes, PageSpeed Insights can indirectly affect SEO by improving user experience, which is a factor considered by search engines.

Can PageSpeed Insights be used for mobile sites?

Answer:

Absolutely! PageSpeed Insights provides specific recommendations for optimizing mobile websites and improving their performance.

Conclusion

The number one factor for improving your Google Page Speed is optimizing images.
The second most important thing you can do is reduce the code on your pages, including scripts and stylesheets.
Ensure all your CSS and JavaScript files are concatenated into a single file (or fewer files) before being served to users. This will help keep them from downloading multiple resources at once, which can significantly slow down page load times depending on how many resources there are in total and how much data they require from each other (e.g., if two scripts depend on each other).
Minimize redirects by using permanent 301 redirects instead of temporary 302 ones whenever possible–this way, users won’t have their browser make extra requests when following links across different pages within your site because they’ll always be sent directly back without having been redirected first!

References

https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/rules

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ranking-factors/page-speed/

https://neilpatel.com/blog/google-pagespeed-insights/

https://www.cloudways.com/blog/google-pagespeed-insights/

https://calibreapp.com/blog/how-pagespeed-works