Wondering why your site is not ranking despite all of your best efforts? Your web page’s slow loading speed can be the major reason. According to Google, the ideal loading speed of a page for LCP (largest Contentful paint) is less than 2.5 seconds. Google page speed insight metrics can help you analyse web speed. So you can work on improving it and rank higher on SERPs.
Here in this blog, we will guide you on the Google page speed insights tool and how to boost your score.
What is Google PageSpeed Insights?
Google Page Speed Insight tool is a tool that helps in analysing website performance on desktop and mobile devices. It also provides valuable metrics known as Core Web Vitals. So the SEO experts can assess user-experience quality.
With the help of the tool, you will get a score between 0 to 100. The higher the score is, the better your web page speed and efficiency.
The performance report provided by Page Speed Insight Metrics is based on two data types, i.e., lab data and field data. Lab data is collected in a controlled environment and field data is real-world data. The real-world data is based on the user experience that they get by interacting with websites.
What is Google PSI’s Good Dcore?
A good Google page speed insight score is over 90. A score between 50 to 89 means your website speed needs improvement, and below 50 is considered a bad or poor score.
How to Use Google Page Insight Tool:
Like all other tools, using Google Page Insight is also easy. Here is how you can use it:
Go to PageSpeed Insights and type the URL you want to analyse. It can be your webpage or your competitor’s site webpage. Click on the analyse button after typing the URL.
Now, wait for the tool to analyse the page; it can take a few seconds according to the complexity of the page and internet speed. The tool provides reports for both desktop and mobile views.
Core Web Vitals:
At the top of the report, you will see whether you have passed or failed the Core web Vitals Elements.
The Core Web Vital elements are a group of three metrics that depict website interactivity, visual performance, and loading time. Also known as LCP, INP, and CLS. You can read more about Core web vitals on our blog.
Coming back to the PSIs, you will see at the top of the report whether you passed Core Web vitals metrics or not.
Performance Section:
Next to it will be the Performance section. Here you will find scores on four important elements, i.e., performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO. Let’s know more about it.
Performance Score:
The performance score is weighted on Core web vitals, total blocking time and speed index. The score indicates how well your page performs concerning optimisation and speed.
Accessibility:
It is a category that provides scores based on various factors, including navigation ease, Alt text images, and colour contrast for visitors with visual impairments.
Technical SEO Practices:
The score under this category tells how well your website is created technically. It can be secure connections, modern web technologies use, and optimised codes, along with Java Script effective management and meta tags.
SEO:
The last section/category is SEO. The score tells how well or badly your page is optimised for SERPs. The score is evaluated by considering aspects like website structure, metadata, and mobile friendliness features.
Diagnostics:
Diagnostics are the last section of the report. Here, you will find Google recommendations to improve site score.
The section lists the issues your site is having and how to improve it so the site can rank higher and perform better.
You can click on every item to investigate the issue further and find out how to fix it. Once you follow the suggestions and resolve the issues, rerun the analysis to see if the page is working well. For better results, run the analysis at least two times at different times of day and compare the results.
Tips to Improve Page Speed Insights Score:
You can improve your page speed insight score to minimise any issues. Few of the issues can be resolved by anyone. Still, for many, you might need the help of an expert web developer or technical SEO specialist. For instance, Java Script issues are only a game for experts. Here are a few tips to improve page speed insights metrics score
Reduce Or End Render-Blocking Resources
Sometimes CSS, font files, or Java Script block websites from loading quickly. By removing these hurdles, the page can load faster, and the score can be improved.
Focus On Server Response Time:
You can speed up page loading by improving server response time, TTFB. Here is how you can do it:
- Choose a web hosting service that ensures fast servers
- Optimise code to remove unnecessary loading time
- Index database tables
- Add more RAM and upgrade faster processor
- Use Content delivery network – CDN divides page resources access on multiple servers.
Optimise Images:
Visuals take lots of time to load and can affect your Google Page Insight tool metrics. You can simply optimise images to speed up page loading time. Let’s see how it can be done.
- Resize image
- Compress the image to keep pixels intact while reducing its size
- Use the appropriate format of image such as WebP, JPEG, or PNG
- Use attributes like “srcset” to make image size flexible based on the screen size.
- Use relevant plugins to set image size automatically.
Conclusion:
The Page Speed Insights Metrics is a great tool that lets us know how our site performs and why we lag on SERPs. Search engine algorithms consider page speed as a crucial element of user-friendliness, and if your website is not up to the mark, the ranking can be affected.
Tips like eliminating render-blocking resources, optimising images, and focusing on server response time can help improve page speed and let you rank higher on SERPs.
