Every SEO professional knows that page speed isn’t just a “nice-to-have” feature; it’s a critical component of both your search engine rankings and your overall user experience. There are many tools available, like Google’s Pagespeed Insights, that give you a numeric score or a grade for your website’s performance. But it’s important to understand that the score itself isn’t the most important part. A score of 70 out of 100 isn’t a problem, and a score of 90 isn’t a silver bullet.
The real goal of measuring your page speed is to get actionable suggestions for improvement. These tools provide a list of things you can do to make your website faster. As an SEO, your job is to work with developers to find the low-hanging fruit: those improvements that are easy to implement but have a big impact. You’ll likely never get to a perfect score of 100, and that’s okay. The goal is to identify and fix the issues that are most affecting your visitors and, in turn, your SEO.
Understanding Pagespeed Suggestions
When you use a tool like Pagespeed Insights, you get a list of suggestions. These are broken down by their estimated impact (how much a change will help your page speed) and effort (how long it will take to fix). As an SEO, your job is to prioritize these suggestions and create a plan to fix them.
High-Impact, Low-Effort Fixes
Some of the most valuable changes you can make are also the easiest.
- Enable Text Compression: This is like a zip file for your website. It reduces the size of your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files by up to 90%. A developer can easily do this by enabling Gzip or Brotli compression on your server.
- Leverage Browser Caching: This means your website’s images, JavaScript, and stylesheets are saved in a visitor’s browser. When they return to your site, these files don’t have to be downloaded again, making the experience much faster. This is also a simple server setting to enable.
High-Impact, Medium-Effort Fixes
These changes require a bit more work but can have a huge positive impact on your pagespeed.
- Properly Size and Optimize Images: A huge image that is only displayed as a small thumbnail is a waste of bandwidth. You should always make sure your images are the correct size for the space they will be displayed in. This is especially important for responsive designs, where a website needs to display a different image for different screen sizes. Our AI Image Alt Text Generator can help you write a good description for your images, which is also a great way to improve your SEO.
- Remove Unused Code: Every line of code that is loaded but not used is a waste of a search engine’s crawl budget. You should remove any JavaScript or CSS that isn’t being used on a page. This is a technical fix that a developer can help you with.
Medium-Impact, Low-Effort Fixes
These changes are quick to implement and can provide a noticeable boost.
- Preload Key Requests: This means you are setting the priority of the files that need to be downloaded by the browser. By telling a browser to load a file as soon as possible, you can make the user’s experience of a page loading much faster.
- Lazy-Load Offscreen Images: This is a technique that delays the loading of images until they are about to be visible on the screen. It can have a big impact on pages with a lot of images that are below the fold.
Low-Impact, Low-Effort Fixes
While these changes won’t have a huge impact, they are quick and easy to do, so there’s no reason not to do them.
- Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: This refers to making your code smaller by removing unnecessary spaces and characters. It will make your files smaller, so they take less time to download. This is a task that a developer can automate as part of their workflow.
