Q: Do you guarantee that websites will meet Google’s PageSpeed Test?
Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is one of Google’s tools to measure and improve your site’s performance on mobile and desktop devices through both lab and field data. Many clients wonder if Google’s PageSpeed Insights score matters, and our short answer is yes.
PageSpeed is essential to your website’s success as addressing loading times improves your SEO rankings, your user experience, and conversion rate. Therefore, we strategically design and develop websites with this key metric in mind. Every custom WordPress site that we develop originates from a stripped-down base theme, which at the start of a project scores in the high 90s. A score of 90 or above is considered good, a score of 50 to 90 needs improvement, and a score below 50 is considered poor.
We develop the base theme to minify and combine CSS and JS files, optimizing the CSS delivery. Depending on functionality requirements, we may delay specific JS to postpone load until the user interaction begins which reduces initial load time.
We include options to customize image and iframe displays on your site. With LazyLoad, you can defer the loading of images or iframes, leaving them “off-screen” until the user needs them. Lazy-loading optimizes both perceived and real performance while saving the users’ bandwidth because image downloads are not required.
We determine specific third party scripts to connect and preload the domain within the cache before the page loads to reduce any render blocking scripts that we cannot optimize ourselves.
In addition to the way the website is built, the server environment, speed, and caching also contribute heavily to PageSpeed scores. We recommend WP Engine, the leading WordPress hosting platform. WP Engine delivers increased security and performance out-of-the-box. Their advanced network includes Layer 3 & 4 DDoS protection, Cloudflare’s powerful CDN, and Cloudflare Polish lossless image compression. Additionally, the network supports HTTP/3 which accelerates HTTP requests by using QUIC resulting in encryption and performance improvements compared to TCP and TLS.
Of course, how a site is maintained, particularly with regards to adding new content, what plugins are being used, and image size will affect the PageSpeed score, which isn’t just a one-time test to be passed. We advise clients on how to ensure that the images that are uploaded balance quality with file size, and that resource-intensive assets are loaded onto less critical pages within a site, for performance’s sake.
In conclusion, you want to use every tool in the toolbox to improve your site’s performance. By partnering with a digital agency who understands how every line of code affects not only how your site looks, but how it functions, will position your site to score well on PageSpeed scoring.
