www.wordstream.com Open in urlscan Pro
2606:4700:10::ac43:faa  Public Scan

Form analysis
4 forms found in the DOM

GET https://www.wordstream.com/

<form class="ws-form-2" role="search" method="get" action="https://www.wordstream.com/">
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GET https://www.wordstream.com/

<form class="ws-form-1" role="search" method="get" action="https://www.wordstream.com/">
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</form>

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5 WAYS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR SITE FOR GOOGLE PAGE SPEED CRITERIA

Guest Author
Last Updated: November 24, 2021 | SEO
Home — Blog — 5 Ways to Optimize Your Site for Google Page Speed Criteria

In May 2018, Google rolled out Lighthouse 3.0, an updated version of their open
source tool for auditing the quality and speed of web pages. Lighthouse 3.0
brings new output options for reports, but also a number of changes to the way
that it measures site speed and performance, such as the introduction of First
Contentful Paint as a performance and speed metric and new weightings for
performance audits.



And since May 2018? Google’s released even more changes. That’s why we’re
sharing five ways you can optimize your site today.

Let’s get started.


WHY OPTIMIZE YOUR SITE SPEED NOW?

Lighthouse has continued to evolve in the year since 3.0 dropped. Google
recently announced that it was working on “Platform Packs” for Lighthouse,
whereby testers can receive speed optimization tips that are specific to the CMS
and code libraries in use on their sites.

So if you’re using Angular JavaScript with WordPress, for example, you’re in
luck, but more variants of Platform Packs are already under development, with
help from the GitHub community.



Image source

Google has been gradually increasing the importance of site speed as a search
ranking criterion since first introducing the mobile-first index in 2016, so
it’s wise to pay attention to these metrics and trends. Google rolled out
approximately 62 algorithm tweak updates over the course of the average week in
2018, so ensuring that you rank well is becoming an increasingly dynamic
practice. And given the relative newness of the mobile-first index, as well as
its disproportionate influence on website traffic, it makes sense that most of
the algorithm refinements would focus on mobile.

Perhaps the strongest argument to keep a close eye on Lighthouse is, this is the
first time that Google has built a self-service speed measurement tool which
attempts to replicate the lag times experienced by real site visitors, as
opposed to bots.

“A lot of these metrics that you’re looking at from Lighthouse are primarily
presented to you with regards to the user-facing side of things,” explained
Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller in February during an Office Hours Hangout
Q&A session. “From our point of view, from a search point of view, we take a
variety of these metrics together to figure out how we should be seeing this
site with regards to speed.”

With all of this in mind, we’ve gathered five tips to help you please the Google
gods with your site speed.


1. IMPLEMENT LAZY LOADING

High-resolution images can significantly slow down the loading time for your
website, as well as increasing memory and page weight. You could cut them from
your site entirely, but you might need or really want to keep them in. Lazy
loading is a way of speeding up page load time without having to get rid of any
of your resource-heavy content.



Image Source

With lazy loading, only part of the web page is loaded at a time—the section
that the viewer is looking at that second, so you’ll put off loading the next
part until the visitor scrolls down to it. This reduces the amount of time it
takes to reach metrics like First Meaningful Paint and First Content Paint,
which are two of the metrics that Lighthouse uses to measure site speed and
performance.

Lazy loading is a must if you’ve implemented “infinite scrolling,” which is
popular with content-heavy sites, but it can help on all types of websites. In
fact, the Duda web design platform has found that following the implementation
of lazy loading on Duda-powered sites, those properties saw an average of
10 points in Lighthouse score lift—nothing to shake a stick at


2. MAKE THE MOST OF NEXT-GEN IMAGE FORMATS

One of the biggest culprits for slow First Contentful Paint times are your
images. The trouble is that when it comes to marketing and sales, a picture
really is worth a thousand words, so you’d be right to resist getting rid of
those designs that favor large hero images. Along with lazy loading, next-gen
image formats provide the solution.

Next-gen formats include JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP. These formats compress
and convert images to make them far smaller than traditional PNGs and JPGs, but
they don’t have a negative effect on the quality of the image. When you use
next-gen formats, you can drastically speed up page load times, even for visuals
with larger pixel dimensions, without sacrificing on image quality. Check out
this data from Insane Lab that shot how much smaller WebP files are than PNG
files:



Google particularly encourages webmasters to use its own new WebP formatting,
which is supported by Chrome and Opera browsers. WebP produces images that are
26% smaller than PNG, and 25-35% smaller than JPG formats.


3. USE A CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK

A content delivery network, or CDN, is a great solution for speeding up your
page loads, which are the second most important metric for a good performance
rating in Lighthouse 3.0.

Basically, a CDN is a network of servers that are distributed all around the
world and work together to deliver your content. Because the servers in a CDN
are geographically dispersed, there’s always one that’s closest to almost every
user, cutting down on the time it takes for your content to reach their browser.



Image source

CDNs often use advanced compression tactics as well, such as minification and
file compression, which help your content assets transfer more quickly, offering
better content availability and redundancy, so that heavy traffic doesn’t
interrupt your website performance. CDNs are less likely to go down in the face
of a hardware failure. Major content-heavy sites that rely on super-fast loading
times, like Netflix, Facebook and Amazon, use CDNs.


4. GET RID OF UNNECESSARY PLUGINS

If you have a site that runs on WordPress or a similar platform that relies on
plugins for extra functionality, those plugins could be reducing the
responsiveness of your site, affecting its interactivity metrics and dragging
down your Lighthouse 3.0 performance scores.

Some plugins might be vital for your site, like your payment processor, but
others might not serve much purpose anymore. Many plugins query third-party
servers for information, which might further slow things down. In a recent
survey from DigWP, over 900 WordPress professionals indicated the number of
plugins that they usually see as the threshold of “too many,” with 75% of
respondents agreeing that 25 is the limit. Over one-third of respondents
recommended 10 as the limit.



Extra plugins can lead to database bloat, gratuitously expanding the weight of
your site, making it much slower to load, so the fewer you have, the better.


5. REMOVE CSS RULES THAT YOU DON’T USE

Your site’s CSS rules are defined in the main.css file. It’s also called the
external stylesheet, because it’s stored separately from the site HTML. In order
for your site to load First Contentful Paint, which has a high impact on
performance according to the new Lighthouse version, the browser has to first
retrieve, parse, and process every CSS stylesheet to determine how the content
will be displayed.

As a result, it’s inevitable that every extra CSS file slows down page load time
and affects performance a little more. For each file, the browser has to access
it, download, and only then can it render the page.



Image source

Minifying your CSS files using a plugin like Fast Velocity Minify can help a
great deal with your Lighthouse scores, but you can do more to ensure CSS load
times don’t hold you back. Removing all unused CSS definitions speeds things up
still further and streamlines your website performance for better Google
ratings.


FOLLOWING GOOGLE’S SPEED CRITERIA IMPROVES PERFORMANCE

The introduction and ongoing development of Lighthouse 3.0 should be seen as yet
another reminder of the importance of optimizing your site according to Google’s
latest speed criteria. By getting rid of CSS rules and plugins that you don’t
need, using CDNs and next-gen image formats, and making the most of lazy
loading, you can streamline your site, reduce page load time, and improve
performance to stay in Google’s good books.

About the author

A consultant, social media specialist, and blogger based in Tel Aviv, Gabrielle
Sadeh helps brands share their voices and scale their businesses through
powerful digital marketing strategies. The best way to get in touch with her is
via her LinkedIn profile.

MEET THE AUTHOR


GUEST AUTHOR

WordStream’s guest authors are experts, entrepreneurs, and passionate writers in
the online marketing community who bring diverse perspectives to our blog on a
wide range of topics.

See other posts by Guest Author





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