You may have heard about the phrase ‘First impression is the last impression’, same applies to the world of website analytics. If your visitors do not consider your website ideal on the first attempt, it is likely that they won’t return to your platform again. This is why you should consider website optimization tips to ensure a great Google PageSpeed Insights score.
For those who don’t know what loading speed is, it is the speed which enables the visitors to check the information provided on your website. Many people do not wait for many seconds for the website to load, especially when they have an established internet connection. Therefore, website speed is considered a catalyst for many search engine results. Moreover, many website owners use a unique PageSpeed Insights tool for website optimization purposes.
Tips to Ensure a Great PageSpeed Insights Score
Websites that have a great loading speed and results in Google Analytics have a better chance of attracting visitors. Moreover, their website will experience low bounce rates, high lead conversions and as a consequence, high search engine results. A slow website can damage your credentials and reduce traffic. No visitor would be bothered about your platform. Improving websites via the following site optimization tips will enable you to maximize the potential of your content to create a web presence.
1. Assess Your Website’s Performance
The first tip to get a high Google PageSpeed Insights speed score is to simply assess your website’s performance. You must look into your daily website statistics to ensure whether your platform is working correctly or not. There are numerous tools for you to check your Google PageSpeed Insights score. Pagespeed Insights by Google is an ideal tool to visualize performance tests of your website and give recommendations regarding its improvement.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
PageSpeed Insights by Google can work well for both desktop and mobile versions. The recommended loading speed of a website is three seconds. Anything more than that is a consequence of incompetence from your side, which will make you lose visitors. Therefore, you must make sure that your platform loads successfully in the given timeframe.
Strikingly is a platform that has been working really hard for the improvement in website analytics. Our tech team has optimized website speed over the years. Most of the websites of our platform have a score of more than 90 on Google PageSpeed Insights. A high Google PageSpeed score improves your SEO and ensures that your visitors are getting considerable customer experience, on both desktop and mobile versions.
2. Optimize Images
The optimization of images is one of the fundamental reasons why it takes so long for a website to load. Therefore, it is one of the most common areas to improve upon, as the improvement in both the load time and Google PageSpeed insights score is crucial for your website’s success. As there are more people inclined towards content management and adding products, little attention has been paid to image optimization. Therefore, when you optimize your images, you must consider PageSpeed Insights tools to see the difference in the loading speeds of your website.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
∙ Optimize Image Size
Even though it is good to use high-quality images on your platform, they can also play a part in slowing down your website. Numerous photos and videos on your platform can be beneficial for engagement with the users. However, they are of no use if they are taking too long to load.
Instead, it may tarnish the user experience and make you lose out on potential visitors. Strikingly allows you to prioritize the image size specifications, which ensures that everything loads on your website perfectly. You can compress the image without compromising on its quality. ImageOptim is one of the ideal online tools for you to process your image substantially.
∙ Consider Content Delivery Network (CDN)
You must make sure that the images you are uploading are sized correctly. If not, you will definitely experience a decline in your Google PageSpeed Insights score. Strikingly enables you to run your platform on CDN. Our platform ensures that the Strikingly websites load quickly regardless of their access source or location.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
Accessing our CDN enables you to spread the server load across multiple locations and choose the closest one to your device to serve the respective assets. The closer the data, the better the chance to get a high Google PageSpeed Insights speed score. You can consider the best SEO practices for our CDN before trying it.
∙ Delayed Offscreen Images
Moreover, you can look into the delaying offscreen images, which means that they will only be downloaded once the user scrolls. However, Strikingly gives you an opportunity to make your website recognize those images as well. Our websites do not put a question mark about the availability of all images when needed. Therefore, all you have to do is optimize the image. By doing this, we give you a chance to improve your Google PageSpeed Insights score.
3. Improve Server Response Time
The truth is that improving the server response time is something that not many of us are experts in. The reason is that our priorities are different. We are more inclined towards minimizing the website load and improving the hardware. An ideal server response time is a consequence of you choosing the best website host for the publishing of your website. If your website is hosted on a great server, it will have an ideal response time.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
If you want to improve your Google PageSpeed Insights score, then you must know that server response time is crucial for your website’s welfare. Strikingly offers a commendable cloud-based web hosting service that allows you to create your website for business or personal use. Regardless of your subscription package, your website will run smoothly and without any problems. You can chat with our Happiness officers to consider the best hosting solutions for your website.
∙ Browser Caching
If you are using WordPress for building your website (which 35% of the website developers do), you will find it very easy to use browser caching. Browser Caching enables you to create and deliver a static version of your website to your respective users. It is different from the dynamically generated version that you access every time. If you are not using WordPress, you can still set up browser caching manually. It can be used to improve your Google PageSpeed Insights score and Google ranking of your website.
∙ Minimize Redirects
Usually, numerous redirects can build up, which will deprive you of getting a high Google PageSpeed Insights speed score. As a consequence, your browsers have to make external HTTP requests, which impacts your Google PageSpeed Insights score. If you see the difference between HTTP and HTTPS websites, you will see that the HTTPS websites keep the Google search engines happy. Pagespeed Insights will mention all these things in its report.
4. Use SEMrush Site Audit as an Alternative
The SEMrush Site Audit is a brilliant innovation for testing your website speed. If you know what is Google PageSpeed Insights, you would know that it can improve your website. It can optimize both desktop and mobile websites. Most importantly it can improve the Google PageSpeed Insights score by improving the website’s loading speed and getting rid of other performance issues.
SEMrush Site Audit has the potential to look into 130 different technical and SEO mistakes. It provides data analysis, articulates information, pie charts, and directions on everything regarding the content issues. You will always be provided with a concrete analytical report that gives you information regarding the performance issues and the ways to improve them.
The performance report recommends all the actions required to improve your website performance and loading speed. You can conduct the analysis and metrics of your website. The performance report covers the following aspects:
- Page Load Speed
- Average Page Load Speed
- Required JavaScript and CSS files
- Size of JavaScript and CSS files
Apart from this, the performance report contains all the errors, defects, warnings, and areas requiring improvement. All the issues will be highlighted in the report as per the priority and importance. In the ‘Why and how to fix it’ subheading, you will see all the flagged problems, such as:
- Huge HTML page size problems
- Restructuring of chains and loops
- Slow loading of websites
- Uncompressed pages
- Too massive and too many JavaScript and CSS files
With all these things covered, how about giving SEMrush Site Audit a try? As it covers so many issues, it will definitely help in making you cover your visitors better.
Conclusion
In the world of search engines, a website is never the finished article. The website owner continuously finds ways to improve it. Therefore, your website, like many others, is a work in progress. If you want to improve your Google PageSpeed Insights score, speed optimization is something that you have to do continuously. You must create a timeline in which you are able to conduct the speed tests of your website to ensure that it is in a healthy state.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
Strikingly possesses a website analytics tool to provide you an overview of your platform’s performance. However, you can look into a dedicated tool for Google PageSpeed Insights for your website analytics. Any drop in website traffic requires the imminent implementation of website optimization strategies. Therefore, you have to be proactive regarding your website.
