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Optimizing Page Experience For Google Recommended Page Load Time.

The concept of speed has evolved over the years, and now Google recommends a page load time of two seconds or less. There are a number of steps you can take to optimize your page experience for better speed and user experience.

There has always been an obsession for speed if you look at history. Each generation has contributed to making speed enhancements during their time, whether in the field of technology, science, or arts. Today, however, speed has become a major deciding factor.

Be it while buying the car you use for commuting or rating a delivery guy who just handed you a courier. Each one’s performance is judged based on the speed at which they complete a particular task. When you already know that speed has become all-pervasive in our lives, why turn your eyes away from the poor page experience of your website caused by slow page load speed?

What is Google Recommended Page Load Time? 

According to Google, the recommended page load time for websites on both mobile and desktop devices is <3 seconds.

However, the average load time of web pages on mobile devices is 22 seconds, according to the search engine giant.

Some of the top traffic-driving websites on the internet have a load speed of fewer than 4 seconds. This may be due to the fact that these websites have a lower number of elements on their pages, which makes the pages load faster.

If you’re annoyed by slow-moving traffic, you would be even more annoyed by a slow-loading website.

Unlike slow-moving traffic, you have multiple options when it comes to the web.

If you end up on a website with poor page load speed, you can always go back to the search engine and choose the immediate competitor.

If this is not the case, you can directly type the address of another website that provides similar services and access it.

As a website owner, it’s important to think about your target audience when creating content. What are their needs and wants? What kind of information are they looking for? By understanding your target audience, you can create content that appeals to them and helps you achieve your business goals.

If your website takes more than three seconds to load, you may be inadvertently directing your target users to your competitors. A website that loads quickly is essential to keeping users engaged and ensuring they don’t click away to another site. Make sure your site is up to speed to keep your users happy and your business growing.

The study conducted by AKAMAI in 2018 showed that the traditional Page Load Speed timing needs to be updated as the users’ expectations have increased along with the page complexity.

The study found that the average internet user in 2018 expects the web page to be fully interactive as soon as it loads.

The initial reaction of a user who enters a page is to either click on a button or scroll down. This is because the user wants to find something specific on the page, and the button or scroll down bar is the most likely place to find it.

The slow Time To Interactivity (TTI) unfortunately causes users to go through “click rage,” which is simply double-clicking multiple times out of frustration.

It’s important for website owners to understand how long their webpages take to load, when users first interact with them, and whether they provide an immersive experience. This information can help owners improve their sites.

SEO agencies and webmasters are always innovating to ensure a pleasant and engaging page experience for users. We can expect a lot of improvements in the coming days across the web.

Google has been working hard to make page experiences faster, and has developed Lighthouse – an open-source, automated tool to help improve website speed quality.

Lighthouse is a tool that can be used to improve the page speed of a website. It is pre-loaded with the Chrome browser, so even a non-technical user can use it to check the page speed experience of a website.

What is Google Page Experience?

Google is always looking for ways to improve the search experience for its users. The company is constantly exploring new strategies that can make it easier for people to find the information they need. Google is also working on ways to make search results more relevant and useful.

Google is constantly improving its algorithm to provide users with the best search results. The quality of the results provided is essential to the Search ecosystem.

When it comes to search results, Google has always placed a great importance on content and links. In its early days, the company focused more on these two aspects than anything else. This allowed Google to become the leading search engine it is today.

However, as users now access and share information from a wide range of devices – some of which are highly sensitive – Google has stepped up its ranking signals to include page experience.

Google uses a set of signals to assess the overall quality of the user experience provided by a page. This is called the Page Experience. By improving the quality of your page’s experience, you can improve your chances of ranking higher in search results.

Even though quality content and links are still important, the page experience will be one of the many factors that decide the ranking of a webpage.

Google’s algorithm will now give more weightage to the pages that pass all page experience signals when multiple websites provide highly relevant content to the users. The page signal becomes a critical ranking factor in such cases.

What is The New Addition to Google Page Experience Algorithm?

Google has announced that the page experience update is now rolled out completely. This update includes Core Web Vitals as part of the algorithm, which joins other page experience signals such as mobile-friendliness, HTTPS, and intrusive interstitials.

Page Experience Ranking Signal Will Come to Desktop Search By Feb 2022

Starting in February 2022, Google will begin rolling out the page experience ranking update to desktop search results. The rollout will be completed by the end of March 2022, according to Google.

This update will include all of the current signals of the mobile version of the page experience update, as well as making the page mobile-friendly.

“This ranking launch will be based on the same page experience signals that we rolled out for mobile earlier this year,” said Jeffrey Jose,

Product Manager on Search at Google.

We knew the day would come when our beloved Google Maps app would no longer be available on iOS, and that day is today. Google has announced that it is pulling the plug on its Maps app for iOS, effective immediately.

We knew it was coming; Google said it would happen back in May 2021 during Google I/O. The day has finally arrived where our beloved Google Maps app is no longer available on iOS, as Google has announced that it is pulling the plug on its Maps app for iOS, effective immediately.

Desktop vs. Mobile Web Vitals

Google has stated that all the same elements that are included in the mobile version of their site will be included in the desktop version. The only exception is the mobile-friendliness requirement, which is self-evident.

You need to optimize the page speed experience to avoid any drop in web ranking.

Are you new to the concept of Core Web Vital? Don’t worry.

The majority of website owners are not aware of Core Web Vitals and how to check if their site is compliant. This is a problem because Core Web Vitals are important for the health of a website.

A study conducted by ScreemingFrog across 20,000 URLs found that only a small minority of results passed the new Google PageSpeed assessment. For Mobile results, only 12% passed, while 13% of Desktop results did.

There is still a lot of work for website owners to do in order to provide a great page speed experience. Google’s new addition to page experience ranking signal is a step in the right direction, but there is still a lot of work to be done.

We have provided some succinct solutions to some of the most commonly asked questions about this new addition to help website owners improve their page speed experience.

What Are Web Vitals?

Google has stated that Web Vitals is a user experience signal that analyzes a web page’s quality. They have provided a unified guide for webmasters to use as a benchmark. Many believe that sites which are Web Vitals-friendly give users a superior page experience.

Metrics Within Web Vitals 

There are 9 metrics within the Web Vitals that can be found in the Chrome user experience report. By optimizing these 9 key user experience metrics, webmasters can improve the overall user experience of their website.

There are two ways to interpret the page experience of websites: through PageSpeed Insights field data analysis or through real-time simulations. PageSpeed Insights field data analysis uses a number of metrics to assess website performance. Real-time simulations provide another way to understand how users interact with websites.

First Paint

The first paint refers to the key moments after the browser starts rendering the page. This involves the rendering of the background, any images, and any other elements that are not part of the default page layout.

First Contentful Paint

This is the critical juncture in webpage rendering wherein the browser displays any text or images. This is the first time users see a visual element in their browser window.

DOMContentLoad

DOMContentLoaded is the time frame wherein the initial HTML is rendered completely. This is when the DOM is ready to be interacted with, and when all external resources have been loaded.

Onload

This is the moment when all the resources that the page depends on, including stylesheets and images, are loaded.

First Input Delay

FID stands for First Input Delay and measures the time it takes for a user to be able to interact with a page after it has started loading. This is important because if a page takes too long to load, users may get frustrated and leave before they even have a chance to use the page.

Largest Contentful Paint

At this point, users see the main content of the page, which is critical to their understanding of the page.

Cumulative Layout Shift

If a page’s CSS causes a shift in layout after it loads, this can result in a poor user experience. This is especially true if the shift occurs when the user is about to take an important action.

Making the Cumulative Layout Shift as low as possible gives the page visual stability and ensures a better user experience. This is especially important for pages with a lot of content, or pages that are frequently updated.

Title to First Byte

Time to First Byte (TTFB) is a user experience metric that measures the time it takes for a browser to receive the first byte of data from a web server. TTFB is a good indicator of the responsiveness of a web server and other network resources.

Notification Permission

The Notifications API provides a way for web pages to display system notifications to the user. This allows web pages to control how notifications are displayed, making it possible to provide a consistent experience across different platforms.

The Core Web Vitals are three user experience signals that are critical to web performance. These signals are: loading, interactivity, and visual stability.

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What Are Core Web Vitals?

If you want to rank highly on search engines, you need to have great content on your site. This content should be supplemented with quality links. Links from high-quality websites will help improve your ranking.

Sorry, that’s an old adage, and starting in 2021, the whole web ranking dynamic has changed.

Here is why.

Google is now taking into account the Core Web Vitals score of your web pages when deciding on ranking positions, alongside other ranking factors.

One more ranking factor has been added to the list of over 200 Google algorithm signals. This means that there is now one more element that can affect your website’s ranking on search engines.

The great thing is that you are aware of Core Web Vitals and can optimize your website accordingly.

You may be wondering what this new ranking factor is and how your website can achieve the perfect web vitals score.

Core Web Vitals is a set of page experience metrics that analyze the page load speed, interactivity, and visual stability. Most importantly, they help you understand how users perceive the experience of your page.

Google will analyze each page separately to understand the overall user experience.

Which are the 3 Core Web Vitals Metrics?

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is the largest element on a page that takes the longest time to load. This is usually an image or video.
According to Google, the Largest Contentful Paint should be kept below 2.5 seconds. Anything above 4 seconds is considered poor, and it can impact the web rankings starting 2021.

Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals

First Input Delay (FID)

The First Input Delay measures how long it takes for the page to become interactive. This is important because if a page takes too long to become interactive, users are likely to get frustrated and leave. The Largest Contentful Paint is also important, but it measures how long it takes for the page to load, not how long it takes to become interactive.

The data is related to the responsiveness of the page when the user first tries to interact with it. For example, clicking the read more link. The idea FID is less than 100ms.

First Input Delay FID
First Input Delay (FID)

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Google’s Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that measure the performance of a web page. The most important of these is the CLS score, which measures the stability of a web page.

Google considers visual stability to be an important usability factor. This means that they take into account how easy it is for users to read and navigate a page when ranking it in search results.

If the position of design elements is shifted, it can confuse users and sometimes cause them to take unintended actions.

This is annoying to users and Google now wants these pages to be removed from search results.

Any layout shift that occurs during the loading of a page, mostly due to position changes in the viewport, results in low CLS. The ideal measurement of CLS is less than 0.1.

Cumulative Layout Shift CLS
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

I recommend you watch the official Google Video that explains the Core Web Vitals for a better understanding of it.

Importance of Core Web Vitals

By announcing page speed experience as a ranking signal, Google is making the statement that they are concerned about the satisfaction of the users who visit the pages within its search results.

Starting in 2021, a site’s ranking on the first page may suffer if the page experience it provides is subpar, despite having high-quality content and countless backlinks.

The object-based approach of analyzing the page speed is more efficient than all of the currently used metrics (like the score provided by third-party tools).

Google assigns a specific score to each object element, including LCP, FID, and CLS. These scores are used to determine how well a page is performing in terms of loading speed and other factors.

Google uses a combined score to assess whether a page’s experience is good or bad. This score is determined by looking at each element separately.

Google has found that many sites are not yet Web Vitals-friendly. It seems like a far-fetched desire that all sites will comply with the WebVitals standards by May 2021, not just for SEOs but also for Google.

However, Google’s announcement helped many SEOs breathe a sigh of relief.

At Google I/O, the search engine giant announced that the Core Web Vitals will affect not only mobile search results, but desktop results as well.

This was a pretty big announcement in itself. This was the first time that Google is fore-warning the implications of an upcoming ranking factor.

There has been a lot of discussion since Google made its big statement last week. One of the topics of discussion has been websites that have AMP enabled.

AMP pages are automatically Web Vitals friendly because they are rendered from Google’s cache and load quickly on mobile devices.

It is highly likely that all AMP pages will meet the minimum requirements for passing the WebVitals score, according to the FAQ answer provided by Google on Core WebVitals.

We’ve found that optimizing the mobile Page Speed Experience is tricky and requires a lot of backend tweaks. AMP is designed to make sites load quickly from Google’s own cache, so it offers the best page speed experience.

This means that most of the sites out there are already Web Vitals-friendly without breaking a sweat.

Google warns that despite the possibility of most of the AMP-enabled pages being web vitals friendly, heavy images and things outside of AMP’s control could impact the speed.

If you have an AMP-enabled website, you can check how it’s performing on Google’s cached version.

Have you done Web Vitals Check?

You should analyze your website yourself or get professional SEO help to do it for you. By following the steps below, you can improve your website’s ranking on search engines.

Google’s new web ranking signal has been getting a lot of attention lately. Here’s a brief overview of what it is and how it works.

Page speed has been a part of SEO discussion for a long time, and webmasters have tried to make sure they get an overall score above 80% or 90%.

If you want to improve your speed score on tools like Pingdom or GTMetrix, try adding a cache plugin or minimizing your CSS or JavaScript. You’ll probably see a good improvement in your score, which feels great.

Bots are not real humans and they cannot do the analysis. Speed is a secondary factor and user experience is the most important factor. Web Vitals come into the picture to help with this.

Here is how I checked the Page Speed of one of our AMP pages. 

Step 1: Open Inspect Element in Chrome and choose any responsive design from the toggle.

Step 2: Do a Google search for the keyword you are ranking to see the AMP version of the page on the search.

Step 3: Click on the result to see the AMP version of the page rendered from Google’s server.

Step 3: Copy the URL and paste it into PageSpeed Insights tool. 

Step 4: Click on Analyze to Generate Report

Good PageSpeed Score Alone Can’t Rank You #1

I want to be sure that you understand what I’m saying.

An improved PageSpeed score is not the only factor that determines a page’s ranking on Google. Content and links are still the most important factors. However, Web Vitals can be considered as a secondary ranking factor.

Just don’t orphan content and links from your strategy as there are many takers for them (your competitors) who are waiting to grab the opportunity.

The Core Web Vitals will find a sweet spot within the same section in Google’s algorithm where intrusive interstitials, mobile-friendly, safe browsing, and HTTPS have been placed.

These are all factors that are directly related to the page experience of the users. However, Web Vitals may get the upper hand or a bigger share of signals when compared to the rest.

The catch is that Google says the Page Experience Metric is subject to change as the internet ecosystem evolves. This is one important clause within the announcement made in June that not many took cognizance of.

Google has stated that the new Page Experience metrics will see new additions over the coming years as it plans to evaluate and add new user experience objects annually.

Know Your Core Vitals Score Using Chrome Extension

Before I give you tips to improve the Page Experience score, you need to assess your current website’s performance.

Thanks to Google, they have provided a free Chrome Extension to check the page experience signals. This extension analyzes all three objects within the Core Web Vitals.

To get the extension, just go to Github and download it. Once it’s downloaded, unpack the extension and you’ll be able to use it in your Chrome browser.

The report provides an overview of the individual scores received by all three user experience factors. This extension is foolproof and recommended as it uses the web-vitals library that Google has started using from 2021 for ranking and indexing purposes.

How to Analyze Mobile and Desktop Core Web Vitals Scores

Now that you have installed the Chrome extension, you want to check the score. The score will be different for mobile and desktop, but the same extension can be used to check for both devices. If you are not comfortable installing a Google extension for privacy concerns, you can use the Google LightHouse tool or PageSpeed Insight tool to analyze the score of your website.

Checking Web Vitals Score Using Google LightHouse

Step 1: Just open the site in your browser

Step 2: Select the “Developer” Option

Step 3: Click on LightHouse Tab on the far right

Step 4: Toggle between Mobile and Desktop

Step 5: Click on Generate Reports and Check the Performance

Checking Core Web Vitals Using PageSpeed Insight

NB: If a page is new, Google may not have enough samples to generate aggregated field data. In this case, a simulated load of the page is rendered, and the score is displayed.

Step 1: Go to PageSpeed Insights Tool

Step 2: Input your URL and Analyze page speed insights analysis

Step 3: Toggle between Mobile and Desktop

Step 4: Look for pa or Stimulated Data (Lab Data)

How to Check Core Web Vitals Issues Using Google Search Console

Search Console provides a wealth of information about page performance in addition to the Google tools it offers.

Recently, Google added the Web Vitals as a Page Experience feature on the search console. This feature indicates whether all the pages within the site are Web Vitals compliant.

If you’re experiencing issues with your page speed, Google Search Console can be a helpful tool. By checking your page speed score, you can get an idea of where your page might be loading slowly. Additionally, the Console can provide suggestions on how to improve your page speed.

Step 1: Log into Google Search Console Dashboard

Step 2: Click on Core Web Vitals in the Experience Tab

Step 3: Check the Score for Mobile and Desktop Devices

Step 4: Open Reports to See Issues

Difference Between Lab Data and Field data

As you start doing the process, you may find that the data does not match up.

I’m not talking about the different speed scores you get from checking multiple pages. I’m talking about the data you see for the same page using multiple tools.

The data you see in the lab is more of a stimulation that is done by the Google Chrome Browser API. This data is collected based on event timers that are triggered and also by calculating the approximation of user interactivity.

The score may change depending on the user’s connection speed and device.

Field data is collected based on the Chrome User Experience data that is collected over 28 days from a variety of samples. This data is more accurate or closer to the real-time user experience. On the other hand, data collected from surveys may be more reliable, but it is not as close to the real user experience.

If you’re not getting the field data you need, rely on lab data for page experience optimization. In the later stage, check the search console for real user experience data for individual pages and make the tweaks you need.

Don’t think that these are highly technical SEO stuff. If Google has added Core Web Vitals to the search console, SEOs and developers must learn inside out about its implications.

What is a Performance Budget?

Google engineers introduced the term ‘Performance Budget’ at the recent Google I/O conference. This budget is based on the idea that websites should monitor their performance every six months to ensure a positive user experience.

Performance budgeting is a process of setting standards for assessing the performance of your website. By taking various factors into account, webmasters can identify and fix issues before they affect the user experience. This helps ensure that your website runs smoothly and efficiently.

  1. TTI – One of the metrics you can use to understand whether users are getting a seamless web experience is TTI or Time To Interactive.
  2. Resources – If your webpage has less than 150 kb of resources in the form of text, images, and js, it’s generally considered good. The smaller the size of JavaScript, the faster the page will load. Good page resource size and small JavaScript files mean a faster loading page.
  3. Lighthouse Performance Index – If the site’s Lighthouse speed score is above 90, it’s generally considered a good load speed signal.

Many top companies, like Walmart and Twitter, have already set a performance budget to ensure that the final build that goes live to users is not laggy. If a new page resource affects the performance budget by at least 1%, the resource is sent to the technical team to get fixed.

Google has announced that the Lighthouse tool will now support the resource quantity budget JSON file that can be uploaded within the Command Line Interface of Lighthouse. This will allow users to more easily track the resources used by their website and ensure that they stay within their budget.

The new LightWallet feature in Lighthouse CLI lets you easily check if your website’s load speed meets the expectations set by your developers. This is especially useful for small businesses who want to make sure their website is performant without much hassle.

How to Set a Performance Budget?

A budget file can be created as a JSON script which would include resource types, the budget allocated and the overall total requests. If you have trouble creating the budget.json file, you can visit the site Performance Budget Calculator. The site can generate a report for your website.

Google’s research in collaboration with Awwwards found that Page Load Speed has the most impact on the user’s mobile experience.

The study found that load speed is the most critical factor for a website. Other factors like the ease of finding what the users are looking for, how well the site fits into the screen, the simplicity and attractiveness of the site are all less important than the load speed of a page.

The high load speed of a website is directly related to its bounce rate – the slower the website, the higher the chance users will leave without interacting. This is because users are impatient and will not wait around for a website to load. If they landed on your website and it takes too long, they will simply go back and find another site.

Recent research done by Google has found that a site that loads within 1-3 seconds has a possible 32% increase in bounce rate. Moreover, a site that loads in 1-5 seconds will possibly have a 90% increase in the bounce rate. This means that if your site takes longer than a few seconds to load, you could be losing a lot of potential traffic.

From a business perspective, the load speed of your website has a direct impact on your ROI and the success of your business. A slow loading website will result in a high bounce rate, as users will simply leave the site rather than wait for it to load. This will result in fewer page views, and therefore less opportunity to generate leads or sales. A fast loading website will keep users engaged, and result in more page views and conversions.

If your website takes six seconds to load, you may be losing potential customers and affecting your business’s bottom line. Google says that investing time and money to optimize your website’s speed will pay off.

Google gave an example during Google I/O about how Pinterest and Tinder increased their ROI by improving the Page Load Speed. Google is an official partner of both Pinterest and Tinder.

How to calculate the ideal performance budget for your website?

A website that wants a TTI (time to interactive) of 4 seconds may have to decrease the size of images, JavaScript, and other resources to less than 400KB. Google says that every additional 100 kb of JavaScript can increase the TTI by 1 second.

How to Improve Page Experience Score?

You may think that optimizing websites for a better page speed experience is the task of the developer, but you would be wrong.

SEOs need to have the technical knowledge to stay up-to-date with changing trends.

If you want to give the right instructions to developers, it’s important to try and understand how the proposed fixes will improve site speed and user experience. This is especially critical if you’re not familiar with coding.

There are a few things that even a newbie SEO can do to help improve the speed of a website, such as installing a cache plugin or minimizing the CSS and JavaScript. However, it’s not clear if these measures will have any impact on Web Vitals.

The answer to this question is both Yes and No. The reason is that some of the fixings can help in making a little improvement, but when it comes to the goal of improving the web vitals, they have little impact. However, if the goal is to improve web vitals, then these fixings will have little impact.

We analyzed the Web Vitals score of some of the in-house websites after making minor changes. The changes we made were designed to improve the Web Vitals score, and our analysis showed that they were successful in doing so.

  • Installed a Cache Plugin
  • Minimized the CSS
  • Minimized JavaScript
  • Used Defer Attribute
  • Enabled GZip
  • Enabled LazyLoad

The GTMetrics and Pingdom tool said the page experience signals were great, but the Google Web Vitals Extension said they sucked. The result was not impressive and not worth sharing.

The main finding of our research was that if you have strong technical support, moving elements from the top to bottom and removing render-blocking javascript will help improve your website.

Here is why:

1. Installing a cache plugin can help improve server response time, but only if users revisit your site. This is most useful when users are browsing through multiple pages. However, if you haven’t set the right expiry for resources, the cache plugin may not be effective.

2. Making changes to the load sequence of JavaScript and CSS can result in a bad page experience. You may get a 90+ rating on third-party tools, but users may experience volatile changes as the page unfolds in the browser.

3. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for improving page speed. If you are running a WordPress site, or any other CMS, you need to install multiple plugins for optimization. However, this can further deteriorate the speed of the site.

Optimizing Images for Page Speed

One of the reasons for bad page experience is the heavy payload of images that are rendered by browsers as page loads. This can cause the page to load slowly, and can be a major contributor to poor user experience.

Image optimization is an important part of website performance. By optimizing images, you can speed up the site and improve your Web Vitals score. Here are a few quirky ways to optimize images:

Use Image CDN: If you have an image-heavy design, your server may have difficulty delivering the resources to the user’s browser. In addition, the server may be providing other resources within the payload simultaneously to the browser, which could make the user wait longer for the whole page to load.

Image CDN servers can help take the pressure off your server by serving images using CDN servers that are closer to the user’s location. Currently, AWS and Cloudflare are the best Image CDN providers in the market.

WebP Format: If you haven’t tried using the WebP format for your images, you should! Google approves of this image format, and it can reduce the image size by at least 36% compared to JPEG.

WebP is a modern image format that supports transparency and typically provides 3x smaller file sizes compared to PNG. Most CDNs today deliver images in WebP format.

LazyLoad: LazyLoad is a great way to reduce your website’s load time. This strategy has been around for a while and is proven to be effective. By lazy loading images, you can ensure that your website loads faster and your visitors have a better experience.

We found that by lazy loading images, we can improve the web vitals score. This is because the server is not loaded with image requests all at once.

LazyLoad enables the initial set of images to be rendered while users land on the page, giving them a seamless user experience. This allows for a better user experience, as they are not waiting for all the images on the page to load.

The other images only load when the users reach a particular viewpoint.

Optimizing Java and CSS

  • GZIP Compressiongzip for speed

GZIP compression is a standard practice for the majority of websites that can significantly reduce the size of the transferred resource and the time to download the resources.

Minifying Resources

Minification is the process of removing unnecessary data from your JS and CSS files in order to reduce load time on websites and bandwidth usage.

To minify JS, CSS, and HTML files, you need to remove comments and extra spaces. You can do this with the help of most optimization plugins.

Combine Javascript and CSS

If you combine your Javascript and CSS files, it will reduce the number of requests and speed up the process of rendering. For example, if your page loads 5 external Javascript and CSS files each, combining them will result in 8 fewer requests.

CSS files can render blocking, which can interrupt a page’s critical path if there are too many files loaded. Multiple Javascript files can also limit the parsing of your HTML document if they are not deferred properly.

Reduce Render Blocking

If your PageSpeed score is low, it may be due to excessive use of Javascript and CSS. To fix this, you need to identify which scripts are causing the problem. The PageSpeed Insights tool can help you with this. Once you know which scripts are slowing down your site, you can eliminate them.

You can make JS files load only when other elements on the page are ready by using asynchronous loading. This is a popular method for deferring JS.

Deliver Javascript and CSS using CDN

If you’re not using a CDN, you’re using your server’s bandwidth to load Javascript and CSS files. You can reduce the load on your server without a CDN, but only to a certain extent.

Optimizing the Font

While custom fonts may make your site look more attractive, they can also slow it down by increasing the load on servers.

This issue can be fixed by ensuring that your CDN can override font rendering behavior.

By using a CDN, the text can be rendered while the CSS loads. This way, the original text is displayed while the CSS loads on the server. The actions only take a few microseconds.

Embed Codes

Images and videos can slow down the speed of a website. Many businesses cannot choose to ignore these features on their site. Google recommends lazy loading, which means that these media files will load only when promoted by the users.

This technique has been shown to improve performance by 70% in LightHouse.

Conclusion

The Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that measure the quality of a user’s experience on a website. Achieving a perfect score on these metrics can be a challenge, but the benefits to the user experience are significant. Improving your score on the Core Web Vitals can help increase conversions and improve the overall quality of your website.

If your web page loads slowly, people will go to your competitors’ sites or keep clicking on your page in frustration, a phenomenon known as “click rage.” This is an actionable insight for many webmasters to improve their site loading speed.

Google has found that the average page load speed for both mobile and desktop devices is 3 seconds. Most websites that rank highly on Google fall within this speed limit. With this new ranking factor, Google will now prioritize user experience above all else. If a website does not meet this standard, they may lose web traffic and their position in SERP rankings.

Frequently Asked Questions on Page Speed

Q. What is the ideal page speed for any content to rank better on SERP?

Ans: Google measures page speed by categorizing pages as really good or pretty bad. According to Google’s Martin Splitt, there is not much of a threshold between the two extremes as far as the Google algorithm is concerned. This statement indicates that there is no ideal speed that Google is looking for.

Q. If a website’s mobile speed using the Test My Site tool is good and GTmetrix report scores are high, how important are high Google PageSpeed Insights scores for SEO?

Ans: Google’s John Mueller recommends using different types of these tools and looking at the data to discover the glitches on your web pages that are slowing the website down. Each of these tools measures slightly different things and presents results in a different way; hence Splitt from Google suggests site owners be mindful about it and choose the best one for their audience.

Q. What is the best metric(s) to look at when deciding if page speed is “good” or not? Why / why not should we focus on metrics like FCP (First Contentful Paint) / FMP (First Meaningful Paint) instead of scores given by tools like PageSpeed Insights?

Ans: The importance of these metrics varies depending on what users are doing on your website. If they only intend to read content and not interact with anything, then FMP and FCP would be the best metrics to look at. However, if people are landing on your page and interacting with things immediately, then TTI and FCI would be better metrics. Splitt and Mueller from Google recommend site owners to look at multiple sets of data and find areas of improvement according to what’s important for the audience.

Written by MH Mamun

MH Mamun

I am a freelance writer and editor from Upwork. I have over 5+ years of experience in the publishing industry and have written for both local and international publications. I am a versatile writer with a keen eye for detail, and my areas of expertise include travel, food, and lifestyle. In addition to writing, I also have experience in copywriting, proofreading, and fact-checking. I am a reliable and hardworking freelancer, and I am confident that I can deliver high-quality work to my clients.

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