What is Google Page Speed?
Google Page Speed is a set of free tools which evaluate how quickly your website loads. It also gives your website two-speed scores of up to 100 – one for mobile and one for desktop.
It would be best if you aimed for a score of 90 or above. A score under 50 is officially slow and needs urgent improvement. Luckily, we’ve got many recommendations to boost your WordPress site speed below.
You can check your website’s performance by going to the Google Page Speed Insights page and simply typing in your URL. It’s worth checking your Google Page Speed scores regularly and trying to improve them over time.
Why is Google Page Speed important?
Often WordPress beginners think that if their website loads rapidly for them, it must be fast. However, because of caching, browser location, and various other factors, your site often loads more quickly for you than for other users.
Having a quick WordPress website is vital in today’s fast-paced digital world. Users are generally extremely impatient and will exit sites that take too long to load. This means that If your site is slow, you could be losing a lot of website traffic.
Additionally, speed affects how users interact with and engage on your site. Ultimately, faster sites get more sales, sign-ups, donations, and other conversions – so improving your site speed could improve your bottom line.
Finally, page speed is a search engine ranking factor. The more quickly your site loads, particularly on mobile
The higher it will displayed on search engine results pages.
Ways to improve WordPress page speed
We now give our top tips to improve your Google PageSpeed score on WordPress…
1) Optimise your images
Oversized images are the most common cause of slow WordPress sites. The larger the picture files on your website, the longer your site takes to load.
Therefore, optimizing your images is a vital step to improve your website speed. Optimizing involves resizing and compressing image files to quickly retrieved and loaded.
Good image optimization involves two stages. Firstly, make sure to edit your image before uploading it to your site.
To do this, you’ll need to decide where the image will used and what size is needed. You can then use a tool such as Pixlr to crop and save the image in the smallest possible size. Sometimes even changing the file type can reduce size – for example, jpg is usually smaller than png images.
Secondly, install an image optimization plugin on your website – we recommend Smash. This not only compresses images further after they are uploaded.
Thus boosting page speed but also has various other image optimization features, including lazy loading.
2) Enable caching
By enabling caching on your website, your site data can stored locally in temporary storage spaces, called cache
This means that browsers can load your site files more easily and don’t have to redownload everything from your server every time your site is needed.
Caching thus makes your page loading speeds much faster, especially when people return to your site for a second or third time. It’s super-easy to enable WordPress with a free plugin such as W3 Total Cache.
3) Think mobile-first
As Google mainly uses the mobile version of websites in its rankings, it’s vital to think mobile-first to design and optimize your site’s speed.
The easiest way to ensure fast mobile loading is with a responsive WordPress theme.
In addition, several plugins are great for optimizing your WordPress site’s mobile speed. WebP Express converts your site images into super-fast web versions, which work on 80% of mobile browsers. Bear in mind, however, that this also requires adding image compression software on your server.
The AMP plugin is also recommend to boost mobile speed. It creates AMP versions of your web pages which load instantly on mobile and other devices.
4) Enable GZIP compression
your website files are transferred between your server and users’ browsers in lightweight compressed versions. This makes the process in which browsers retrieve and load your website much faster.
We recommend installing the WP-Optimize plugin, which has a GZIP compression option. This plugin will also be useful for our next point when minifying website files…
5) Minify CSS, HTML & JS files
If your Google Page Speed score needs improving, minifying Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), HTML, and JavaScript (JS) files will certainly listed as a recommendation.
CSS, HTML, and JS files are used to add comments to your website code, for example, to clarify formatting or style. Minification sounds complicated, but it simply means reducing the size of these files and deleting unnecessary code.
Doing this is hugely beneficial as it will enable your site to load more rapidly whilst retaining the key information needed for your site to display correctly. With the free WP-Optimize plugin, you can minify your JS, HTML, and CSS files on WordPress quickly and easily.
6) Update plugins
Plugins may be reducing your site speed in various ways. Poorly-designed plugins, outdated software, or surplus/duplicate plugins can all contribute to slow website loading.
It’s worth remembering that it’s not the number of plugins that generally cause a speed problem.
In general, the quality and usefulness of plugins affect page speed.
It’s a good idea to run a Google Page Speed test before and after installing any plugin. This will show the impact of the plugin on your site’s speed, so you can make an informed decision about whether the plugin’s functionality is worth any site slowing.
You can also check how your current plugins affect your site speed by deactivating each one in turn in the ‘Plugins’ section of your WordPress website back-end and then running a PageSpeed test.
You should also update plugins as and when new software becomes available.
Updates are always highlighted on your WordPress dashboard.
Check regularly and click on any update messages to action them.
7) Clean up your database
Finally, you can speed up your website with a good old spring clean!
The more you use your WordPress site, the more your database becomes clogged up with old and unnecessary files that slow down your performance.
You can keep your WordPress website database tidy by installing a plugin like WP-Sweep or Advanced Database Cleaner. These will work automatically in the background to keep your database up-to-date and maximize page speed.
Need help?
We’re an expert WordPress agency with two decades of experience providing WordPress support and maintenance. Please get in touch if you’d like further help improving your page speed or optimizing your WordPress website.
For more great tips and advice, check out our ultimate WordPress optimization guide, which covers all aspects of maintaining and improving your WordPress website.
