My site is loading slowly!!!
As a website owner, you know that your website needs to be fast. You've read a bunch of articles on how to make WordPress faster and which plugins to install to achieve this. You've probably added a caching plugin, like WP Supercache, and now you want to know what the benefit of these optimizations are.
And so you head to Google PageSpeed Insightsbecause that's what all the articles tell you to do and enter your site URL. You'll get a score and a list of recommendations from Google and at that point you might get embarrassed:
"What are these red and orange warnings?"
"Why isn't my score higher?"
"What do all these recommendations mean ????"
Once you add the caching module to your site, you might expect that your score in the PageSpeed will be almost perfect. Or you'll look at the recommendations and wonder why your caching plugin doesn't automatically fix them.
Many customers ask us why their estimate of PageSpeed is not higher or suggest that since it has not increased much, it means that WP Supercache does not make their site faster.
The simple truth is this:
Your Google PageSpeed score doesn't matter, or to be more precise - it's indicative.
That's right, I said - doesn't matter.
Here's why.
The Need for Speed - The Need for Speed
The goal of WP Supercache and other caching modules is to make website See faster.
The speed, i.e. the loading time of your website, is the most important indicator. This is important for the user experience / and user bounce rate / and hence SEO. When the Google bot crawls your site, it doesn't see your "rank" or your position, only your site speed.
Did you know that Google PageSpeed didn't even measure your site load time until recently?
Quite often and now this option does not work correctly
The easiest way to measure the loading speed of your site is through the browser inspector. For example, Chrome:
To test our sites and measure load times, we prefer to use tools such as Pingdom и GTmatrix. With their help we can test the sites for loading from servers around the world and thus get a realistic picture of the state of the site and the necessary optimizations we need to make.
It's like our grades from school. Do perfect grades mean we're smart? Not necessarily. It just means we knew how to do well on tests. But many smart people just don't do well on tests. Does that mean they're stupid? No.
Just as school grades are not necessarily an indicator of intelligence, Google's PageSpeed score isn't actually an indicator of speed.
Here are 3 websites, all with similar load times but very different PageSpeed results:
And below you can see a site that has a great rating from PageSpeed but its speed is desperate - 3.16 seconds.:
From these examples you can see that the estimation of Google PageSpeed is not a speed indicator.
Chasing a maximum score of 100/100 on Google PageSpeed is a waste of time
No site gets a perfect score of 100/100, in fact it's almost impossible to achieve and since it's not speed related, why bother?
If you try to achieve a perfect score by following all the recommendations that Google PageSpeed makes, you could get a serious mental breakdown. Seriously!
You shouldn't take literally all recommendations from Google PageSpeed because sometimes they are unrealistic or impossible to implement.
For example, PageSpeed may recommend that you Take advantage of browser caching for resources that are not hosted on your website. This is impossible. In the example below, only Facebook and Google itself can add browser caching to these files.
If you use a CDN on your site, PageSpeed may give you a lower score for this, but in many cases the CDN provides a better speed for your international visitors.
Or marking you that you can save 1kb by compressing an image (see below) is not worth wasting the effort. Not to mention that too much compression degrades the quality of your images anyway, and hence creates bad impressions in your visitors.
Render - Javascript and CSS blocking
The general recommendation that PageSpeed likes to make is:
"Remove JavaScript and CSS blocking in prevalent content".
Usually this recommendation is in 2 parts:
1) Remove the display blocking JavaScript:
Preferably, the execution of JavaScript files should be loaded in the footer of your site or asynchronously so that they don't block the download of other assets on your site and therefore slow it down. But what Google doesn't take into account is that sometimes it's not possible to load everything in the footer, especially if you're not a developer and you're using a stock WordPress theme.
If you've enabled JS minification in the popular WP Rocket caching plugin, for example, it automatically detects whether JS files should be loaded in the header or footer based on how the theme developer has set them.
So if you see the "remove JavaScript to block conversion" notification, it means that some JS files are still loading in the header. But this may have been done intentionally by the theme or plugin developer. Sometimes when you move JavaScript files from the header to the footer, it can break your website's functionality and design.
So if you want to improve your PageSpeed score, you can try using this option in WP Rocket's advanced options:
"JS files to be included in the footer during the minimization process" and enter the original full addresses of your JS files ,
Or, if you don't minimize the files, but just want to delay loading, you can use the option:
"JS files with delayed loading:"
If it doesn't break your site's functionality, it can help PageSpeed's score.
Also be sure to check the effect on your site speed.
2) Optimize the CSS display for the following:
WP Rocket does not have a CSS loading option in the footer, as this will cause your site to load without any styles, which will break your design and create a terrible user experience.
However, Google proposes to " optimize CSS display „.
Essentially, they want you to separate out the CSS needed to render the first part of your page and insert it directly into the code of your page, rather than into the main stylesheet.
So, as you may have figured out, if you're not a developer, this is pretty hard to implement and involves editing code in parts of your theme. In short, it's not something that can be done in one click in the caching plugin settings.
If you are a developer or have one, you can ask him to apply this technique. This will certainly improve your overall page load time and increase your PageSpeed score because the elements at the top of the page will load sooner. This type of micro-optimization is used by sites like Amazon where a difference of 10 hundredths can affect their final score. For most small sites, it's unlikely to have much impact.
So what is PageSpeed useful for?
Google PageSpeed can be helpful, but you should not fixate on their recommendations because they are not always feasible or appropriate. In overdoing it, you may even do harm to your site instead of improving its ranking. The most important criteria for a good website is loading speed and a good user experience. They are also inextricably linked. Google PageSpeed recommendations are indicative.
Sometimes you may be alerted to problem areas on the site that you can correct. For example, it may warn you that GZIP compression is not enabled on your server. Most hosting providers have the appropriate tools to enable GZIP compression in their hosting panels. If not, you need to enable it with an additional module or by editing the .htaccess file in your site's root directory.
Or it may warn you that you have images that are too large and can be compressed. This is a good recommendation to follow. A great plugin for compressing images directly from the WordPress panel e Imagify
Below I've illustrated how you can save 750kb, which is 87% less size of your images after compression. This will have a good effect on load times:
It's best to consider PageSpeed as one of several tools in your arsenal that would provide you with the necessary recommendations and information for optimizations, but your goal should always be to improve your speed, not your PageSpeed score.
Recommendations for using PageSpeed
- You should not blindly trust Google PageSpeed or take it as a panacea and last resort.
- Always read the recommendations carefully and consider whether they are feasible, appropriate and worth your time. If you are offered something impossible to do, you should ignore it!
- Be sure to focus on speed and don't worry so much about PageSpeed's rating. In any case, it is good to be above 80/100, but do not fixate on the numbers .
- Always use a few speed testing tools like Pingdom to see the impact of changes you've made to your site.
- If you are not sure of what you are doing best hire a professional. Time is money, and the time you waste struggling to optimize your site yourself is a direct waste of money out of your pocket.