Pagespeed Optimisations (WIP)

Pagespeed Optimisations (WIP)

Before you start (please do not skip this section!)

At the very outset, please understand that the PageSpeed score is just one of the many factors affecting your websites SEO. The biggest factors are still (a) the actual content on your website and, (b) high-quality backlinks to your website.

Next, the mobile PageSpeed score is a an aspirational target and is a constantly shifting goal-post. Please do not be surprised even if after applying numerous fixes & optimizations your Core Web Vitals assessment is still Failing and/or your mobile PageSpeed score still seems low (and red!) Even large (and highly funded) companies struggle to get a good PageSpeed scores (example 1, example 2). In facts, Google's own products fail these PageSpeed benchmarks (example)

This is not to say that PageSpeed scores are not useful. The specific diagnostics and suggestions provided PageSpeed Insights are very useful to guide your optimization process if your business / situation allows it:
  1. In some cases suggestions provided by PageSpeed Insights cannot be implemented at all. For example, in most cases it suggests that you remove third party Javascripts like Google Tag Manager scripts, or Google Analytics scripts, or Meta conversion pixels. Most businesses are unable to implement such suggestions.
  2. In certain cases certain functionality of your website is fundamentally linked to a PageSpeed metric that is being negatively impacted. For example, an auto-scrolling carousel/banner might lead to a bad "Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)" score. Would you want to get rid of this important visual unit from your website?
  3. And finally, in some cases implementing the suggested change would lead to a major engineering effort to deliver a marginal improvement (at best) in actual SEO & business outcomes.
The rest of this guide walks through the common PageSpeed Insights suggestions and our thoughts on the best way to tackle, or ignore, them.

Time to First Byte (TTFB)

This is an easy win. Please move your website behind a CDN, and wait for a few weeks to look at PageSpeed Insights again.  Apart from seeing an improvement in the TTFB, and possible other metrics, you will feel your website pages loading noticeably faster.

Reduce impact of third-party code

TODO

Reduce Javascript execution time

TODO

Avoid an excessive DOM sizee

TODO

Eliminate render blocking resources

TODO

Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy

TODO

Image elements do not have an explicit width and height

TODO

Defer offscreen images

TODO

Avoid enormous network payloads

TODO