Google PageSpeed Insights: What It Is & How to Boost Your Score

What Is Google PageSpeed Insights?

Google’s PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is simply a escaped instrumentality that analyzes the show of your webpages connected mobile and desktop devices. And offers invaluable metrics (known arsenic the Core Web Vitals) to measure the prime of the idiosyncratic experience.

The instrumentality gives you a people betwixt 0 and 100. A higher people usually means your leafage is optimized for velocity and efficiency.

PSI uses Lighthouse (an open-source, automated tool) to analyse webpages’ show and quality. And provides a show study with betterment suggestions based connected 2 types of data:

• Lab data: This is information collected by Lighthouse successful a controlled environment. It helps you debug issues by simulating however your tract loads but mightiness not amusement real-world idiosyncratic acquisition issues.
• Field data: This is real-world idiosyncratic acquisition information gathered from existent users arsenic they interact with your site. It provides a realistic presumption of the idiosyncratic acquisition but includes less metrics.

What Is a Good PageSpeed Insights Score?

A people of 90 oregon supra is good, 50 to 89 needs improvement, and beneath 50 is considered poor, according to Google.

If your people is beneath 90 crossed galore pages, it’s imaginable your users aren’t having a bully experience. And determination whitethorn beryllium immoderate antagonistic SEO effects arsenic well. 

But there’s nary constituent successful obsessing implicit a cleanable people of 100—especially connected each page. Because visitors yet attraction astir rapidly uncovering accusation (or a solution). Not your score. 

How Does Your PageSpeed Insights Score Affect SEO?

Google isn’t moving your tract done PSI and utilizing it to fertile you. But that people is partially based connected page speed—a confirmed Google ranking factor. 

Slow loading times frustrate users and pb them to wantonness your site. But visitors are much apt to enactment and prosecute with your tract if pages load quickly. 

This leads to a amended idiosyncratic experience. And hunt engines reward sites that supply a large page experience to visitors. 

So, improving your PSI people is apt to person a affirmative interaction connected your hunt rankings.

How to Use the Google PageSpeed Insights Tool

PageSpeed Insights is beauteous casual to use. 

Just go to PageSpeed Insights, participate immoderate URL (whether it’s your ain oregon a competitor’s), and click “Analyze.”

Then, hold for the instrumentality to analyse the webpage. This whitethorn instrumentality a fewer seconds to a minute, depending connected the complexity of the leafage and your net transportation speed. 

At the apical of the report, you’ll spot whether your tract passed oregon failed the Core Web Vitals Assessment. Like this:

The Core Web Vitals are a radical of metrics that measurement a website’s (or a page’s) user-friendliness. Based connected load times, interactivity, and ocular stability. 

It includes these 3 metrics:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance, specifically the clip it takes for the largest contented constituent of the leafage to go disposable to the user
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Measures responsiveness, specifically however rapidly (or slow) a leafage responds to idiosyncratic interactions
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures ocular stability, specifically however overmuch the leafage contented moves astir arsenic it loads

Other notable metrics include:

• First Contentful Paint (FCP): Measures the clip a leafage takes to show the archetypal contented element
• First Input Delay (FID): Measures interactivity, specifically the clip it takes for the website to respond to the archetypal idiosyncratic interaction, specified arsenic clicking a fastener oregon a link. (Previously FID was 1 of the 3 Core Web Vitals. INP replaced it successful March 2024)
• Time to First Byte (TTFB): Measures the responsiveness of a web server, specifically the clip it takes for a browser to person the archetypal byte of information from the server. After a idiosyncratic requests a web page.

Next, you’ll spot a show people successful the conception titled “Diagnose show issues.”

Google PageSpeed Insights gives your leafage a people for each of the pursuing categories: 

• Performance: This is simply a weighted mean of the scores of First Contentful Paint (FCP), Speed Index, Total Blocking Time (TBT), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). It indicates however good your leafage performs successful presumption of velocity and optimization.
• Accessibility: This class assesses factors specified arsenic easiness of navigation, alt substance for images, and colour opposition for users with ocular impairments.
• Best Practices: This class measures however good your leafage adheres to web improvement champion practices. From utilizing modern web technologies, optimized code, and unafraid connections, to including indispensable meta tags and managing JavaScript effectively
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): This class focuses connected however good your leafage is optimized for hunt engines, considering aspects specified arsenic metadata, structured data, and mobile-friendliness.

As you scroll down, you’ll find a database of items called “Diagnostics.” 

These are Google’s recommendations for improving your site. That could beryllium optimizing images, simplifying code, oregon reducing server effect time.

This conception lists the show audits that your tract didn’t pass, on with the imaginable savings if the issues are fixed. 

You tin click done each point to dive deeper into what’s causing the issue. And however to hole it.

After you instrumentality the suggestions, rerun the investigation to spot if the page’s show has improved. And see moving the investigation doubly astatine antithetic times of the time due to the fact that you tin sometimes get a antithetic people adjacent without making changes. 

How to Check Speed Across Your Entire Site

To get a fuller representation of however accelerated your full tract is, usage Google PageSpeed Insights on with Semrush’s Site Audit tool. Which measures your website’s velocity and gives heavy insights into the factors affecting it. 

Open the tool, participate your domain, and click “Start Audit.”

Next, travel the configuration instructions and click “Start Site Audit.”

You’ll spot a dashboard similar this one. 

Next, click “View details” nether “Site Performance”.

Within the “Site Performance” report, you’ll spot your mean leafage load velocity successful seconds. 

You’ll besides spot a database of “Performance Issues” you tin code to amended velocity crossed your website. 

How to Improve Your Google PageSpeed Insights Score 

To amended your PSI score, you tin travel the recommendations from your PageSpeed Insights study arsenic good arsenic your Site Performance study successful Site Audit.

Some suggestions whitethorn beryllium casual to instrumentality yourself (e.g., resizing images). Others whitethorn necessitate the expertise of a web developer and/or a technical SEO specializer (e.g., reducing unused JavaScript). 

That said, here's a step-by-step usher to implementing immoderate of Google's astir communal PageSpeed Insights (PSI) suggestions to boost your score. 

1. Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources

Render-blocking resources forestall a webpage from loading quickly. This is due to the fact that resources specified arsenic CSS, JavaScript, and font files unit the browser to load them earlier displaying the page. 

Getting escaped of these roadblocks tin marque your leafage load faster and amended your Google webpage velocity trial score. 

To bash that, travel these steps:

1. Look for "Eliminate render-blocking resources" successful the "Diagnostics" conception of your PSI report.

2. Click connected the arrow adjacent to the proposition to spot the database of resources that are causing the issue. Which volition amusement you which resources are blocking the leafage from rendering quickly—and the imaginable clip savings successful milliseconds.

3. Once you’ve identified the render-blocking resources, the adjacent measurement is to fig retired which ones aren’t indispensable for the functionality of the website truthful they tin beryllium removed, inlined, oregon deferred. 

If you’re not acquainted with coding oregon website development, you are apt to request developer enactment for this step.

2. Reduce Server Response Times

The server effect time, besides known arsenic clip to archetypal byte (TTFB), is the clip it takes for the browser to person the archetypal byte of information from the server. A dilatory TTFB tin negatively interaction leafage load speed, arsenic it delays the clip it takes for the browser to person the page’s content.

When a idiosyncratic tries to entree a webpage, the browser makes a web petition to fetch that content. The server past receives the petition and returns the leafage content.

Google PSI volition supply the proposal “Reduce archetypal server effect time” erstwhile the browser waits much than 600 milliseconds for the server to respond to the request.

To trim server effect times, you tin effort the following:

• Choose a web hosting service that offers accelerated servers and debased latency
• Streamline the server’s exertion logic by optimizing codification and removing unnecessary processes to make pages faster
• Properly scale database tables to amended query performance. If needed, see upgrading to a faster database system.
• Improve server show by adding much random-access representation (RAM) and upgrading to faster processors. So your server tin grip much requests efficiently.
• Use a content transportation web (CDN) to administer your page’s resources crossed aggregate servers. This reduces the clip it takes to present those resources to the user.

You’re apt to request enactment from a developer oregon your web big for this.

3. Optimize Your Images

Images (especially ample ones) tin importantly summation leafage load speed. 

The Google tract velocity trial study shows you each images connected your leafage that aren’t appropriately sized and displays the existent size and imaginable savings successful kibibytes (KiB). 

Resizing these images tin prevention you information and amended the leafage load time.

There are galore ways to optimize your images. And the bully quality is that it’s comparatively simple. 

You can:

• Compress your images utilizing a instrumentality similar TinyPNG oregon ShortPixel earlier uploading them to your website
• Use the due representation format (JPEG, PNG, GIF, oregon WebP) for each representation to optimize the record size and support representation quality
• Use the “srcset” property to service the due representation size based connected the user’s device
• Lazy-load images utilizing a WordPress plugin similar LazyLoad oregon Smush

If you person a WordPress website, this is reasonably elemental to bash yourself. Here’s however to usage TinyPNG to optimize your images:

1. Log successful to WordPress
2. Click “Add Plugin.” Then hunt for “TinyPNG.” Once you’ve recovered the plugin, click “Install” and past “Activate.”
3. Once you’ve registered your account, spell to the “Media Library” and prime “Bulk Optimization.”

The plugin volition amusement you however galore images you’ve uploaded and however overmuch abstraction you’ve saved. 

4. Avoid Chaining Critical Requests

Chaining captious requests is erstwhile a leafage needs to download aggregate files and assets successful bid to load. 

Let’s accidental you’re the ecommerce manager astatine a favored nutrient store. 

On your landing leafage for feline food, the substance won’t amusement up until the images of cute kittens person loaded. And for the images to load, the CSS record needs to load first. And truthful on.

Each petition depends connected the erstwhile request, creating a chain. And if immoderate of the resources doesn’t load, the browser won’t render the page. Which tin origin important delays.

To debar these chains, you request to acceptable priorities. That way, the captious resources load first, truthful the leafage tin beryllium displayed. And the little important things are loaded afterward.

A bully mode to bash that is by adding the attributes "async" and "defer" to your website code. 

The "async" property tells the browser to proceed loading and showing the remainder of the leafage portion the record oregon plus loads successful the background. 

The "defer" property instructs the browser to download the record oregon plus aft the leafage is disposable to the user. This way, the leafage is displayed first, and past the non-essential worldly loads.

If you’re not capable to marque changes to the website codification yourself, you tin inquire a developer to adhd the “async” and “defer” publication tags for you.

It’s important to enactment that utilizing these attributes tin origin issues with definite types of scripts. So, marque definite to trial thoroughly earlier implementing them connected your site.

5. Preload Key Requests

Preloading cardinal requests means telling the browser to prioritize captious assets and download them first. That way, the astir applicable files tin load faster.

Key requests are thing the leafage needs astatine an aboriginal loading stage. The astir communal cardinal requests are fonts. But this tin use to JavaScript files, CSS files, and images, too.

If your tract runs connected WordPress, you tin usage plugins similar Preload Images and Pre* Party that enactment preloading.

Otherwise, inquire a developer to place the captious requests and adhd the preload tag to the code. 

6. Reduce CSS and JavaScript

CSS is an important portion of web design. But CSS files are often larger than they request to be, which slows down your site.

Similarly, JavaScript is important to the functioning of your site. But it tin besides importantly dilatory down your website if the codification isn’t optimized properly.

Reducing the size of your code—a process known arsenic “minifying”—makes it load much quickly.

Minifying your codification involves removing unnecessary characters from your CSS and JavaScript files. Such arsenic achromatic abstraction and comments.

There are galore tools to minify your code, specified arsenic Toptal CSS Minifier, Toptal JavaScript Minifier, and Minify.

You tin besides see utilizing JavaScript frameworks oregon libraries that are designed to beryllium lightweight and fast-loading. Like jQuery oregon React.

If your tract is connected WordPress, you tin usage a plugin to help. Popular plugins for CSS and JavaScript minification see Hummingbird, LiteSpeed Cache, and W3 Total Cache.

Here’s however to usage Hummingbird to minify your code:

1. Log successful to WordPress and prime “Plugins” from the dashboard menu
2. To instal Hummingbird, click “Add Plugin” past “Activate”
3. Find “Hummingbird” successful the dashboard menu, and implicit the setup wizard
4. Then caput backmost to the “Dashboard” 

5. Check that your files are marked “Active” successful the Gzip Compression section.

Check retired our guide to JavaScript SEO for much elaborate instructions connected however to optimize the JavaScript codification connected your site.

7. Defer Offscreen Images

Another mode to code dilatory leafage speeds associated with images is to defer loading for offscreen images—meaning images that aren’t disposable connected the surface but are inactive being loaded by the browser. 

By deferring loading for non-visible images, you tin prioritize the images that are visible. So, the leafage tin load faster. 

You tin bash this utilizing lazy loading. Which means loading images lone erstwhile they’re needed. Such arsenic erstwhile they travel into presumption connected the screen. 

This tin importantly trim the magnitude of clip it takes to load a page, particularly connected mobile devices with slower net connections. 

WordPress has plugins that tin bash that for you, specified arsenic Lazy Loader. 

8. Reduce Document Object Model Size

The Document Object Model (DOM) is simply a tree-like practice of the HTML operation of a webpage. A ample DOM size tin pb to dilatory loading times and a mediocre idiosyncratic experience. 

To trim your DOM size, you can:

• Ask your dev squad to region unnecessary elements and attributes from the HTML codification and region unused JavaScript oregon CSS files 
• Use server-side rendering (SSR) to render pages connected the server earlier sending them to the client
• Avoid (most) ocular leafage builders due to the fact that they make inflated HTML
• Don’t paste substance into what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) leafage builders
• Look for clean-coded themes and plugins

Tools similar Google’s Chrome DevTools tin assistance you analyse your DOM size and place areas for improvement. You whitethorn request developer enactment to instrumentality the changes.

9. Fix Multiple Page Redirects

Redirects automatically guardant postulation from 1 URL to another. They tin besides dilatory down your leafage load speed. 

Let’s accidental you effort to entree a leafage that’s been redirected. The server tells your browser that the leafage has moved. Then, your browser tries to retrieve the caller URL. This further measurement makes it longer to load the caller page. 

One redirect already affects leafage speed. But often, you tin tally into issues with aggregate consecutive redirects. These are known arsenic redirect chains.

Redirect chains often hap arsenic aged pages get deleted and newer ones instrumentality their place. As a result, determination is much than 1 leafage betwixt the archetypal URL and the last URL. Like this:

Google tin travel up to 10 redirects without reporting an contented successful Google Search Console. But redirect chains tin unnecessarily dilatory down your site.

So, it’s champion to support things elemental to amended your PageSpeed Insights score. And you should redirect consecutive from the archetypal URL to the newest URL.

The easiest mode to get an overview of the redirects connected your tract is with an SEO instrumentality similar Site Audit. 

Click the “Issues” tab and benignant “redirect” into the hunt bar. 

Then, click connected “# redirect chains and loops.” 

This volition amusement you a study containing a database of pages, their redirect type, and the fig of redirects.

If you’ve identified immoderate redirect chains, you tin apt log successful to your contented absorption strategy (CMS) to hole them. You’ll request to delete the unnecessary redirects and instrumentality a caller redirect sending postulation lone from the archetypal leafage to the existent one. 

Many escaped WordPress plugins (including Easy Redirect Manager, Redirection, and Simple Page Redirect) volition assistance you modify oregon acceptable up redirects.

Here’s however to bash it with Easy Redirect Manager:

1. Log into WordPress, click “Plugins” and past “Add New.”

2. Search for “Easy Redirect Manager.” Then, click “Install and activate.”

3. Then click “Manage Redirects.”

4. In the “Redirect Rules” tab, participate the code of the aged URL and the 1 you privation to redirect to. And click “Save.”

10. Avoid Overusing Third-Party Code

Third-party codification includes scripts, pixels, and plugins. It tin dilatory down leafage loading times and negatively interaction your PageSpeed Insights score.

Third-party codification typically comes from different companies—such arsenic analytics tools and advertisers—monitoring your tract performance. 

Some third-party codification is indispensable and useful. For instance, you mightiness person the Google Analytics pixel to measurement website performance. Or the Facebook pixel to way advertisement campaigns. 

But you apt person immoderate unnecessary third-party code. Like tools and platforms you nary longer use.

That’s wherefore you should regularly audit third-party codification connected your site. And region thing that isn’t necessary.

In your PageSpeed Insights report, Google flags third-party code. Along with the transportation size and main-thread blocking time.

Pay peculiar attraction to the institution names successful the grey bars. These are the third-party companies moving codification connected your site. Google besides categorizes them (Tag Manager, Social, Utility, Analytics) to assistance you recognize their purpose.

Make enactment of immoderate institution names you don’t admit oregon nary longer need. And instrumentality steps to region their code. 

This is apt to impact deleting the codification from your CMS, uninstalling plugins if your tract is connected WordPress, oregon removing tags from your tag absorption tool.

Audit Your Site to Monitor & Fix Page Issues Faster

If you privation to behaviour a much elaborate tract audit, usage the Site Audit Tool. It scans your website for implicit 140 method and SEO issues. And generates an in-depth study that identifies each areas needing improvement.

Let’s instrumentality a look:

Head to the instrumentality and prime your website.

In the “Overview” tab, you’ll spot the “Site Health” metric. 

This metric shows your website wellness people connected a standard from 0 to 100. And tells you however it stacks up against different sites successful your industry.

You’ll besides spot an overview of the “Errors,” “Top Issues,” etc. recovered connected your site. 

Next, click connected the “Issues” tab.

The instrumentality volition amusement you a implicit database of “Errors,” “Warnings,” and “Notices” that request your attention.

It’ll besides item the fig of affected pages. 

Click connected “Why and however to hole it” to spot the details of a circumstantial issue. And the solution to hole the issue. 

This volition assistance you place and resoluteness astir issues that impact your site’s wide wellness and SEO, successful summation to improving the PSI score. 

Plus, Semrush shows your advancement implicit time. Like this:

You tin adjacent acceptable up automated audits to enactment connected apical of immoderate issues that arise. 

Sign up for a escaped account contiguous to get started.