Getting a good score on Google PageSpeed Insights is important because Google uses these metrics as a ranking of the speed and quality of your website. Increasing your PageSpeed score can help to boost your search visibility and ensure that your website loads fast for your visitors. In this article we’ll explore how you can achieve all greens with scores of 90 and above easily using WordPress.
Start with a theme that doesn’t bring along a lot of bloat
With the right development approach, it is possible to achieve 90+ scores on Google PageSpeed easily with WordPress. One of the most crucial elements to ensuring that your site receives a high score is to start with a theme that minimizes bloat and excess Javascript that can delay loading of your website.
Many themes that try to do it all also include a huge amount of Javascript to enable functionality you may not even need on your website, like sliders, galleries and modal windows. Page builders can also include their own Javascript which will further delay your site’s loading time.
If you’re building for speed, you’ll want to start with as blank a slate as possible to minimize the bloat that comes along with your theme. For my sites, I like to use the excellent Sage 10 theme by Roots which is a developer friendly theme that minimizes bloat out of the box and gives you a nice blank canvas in which you can build a custom WordPress website to match your own custom design. If you’re interested in learning more about Sage 10 we have a Sage 10 installation tutorial available to help you jump start development.
If you’re not using Sage 10 for your theme, try to find a developer friendly starter theme that won’t add a lot of excess Javascript, CSS or third-party libraries as going lean will help to decrease bloat and help you get the site speed required for all greens.
Minimize the use of plugins
Along with the theme, plugins are a common source of bloat that will slow a site down. Each plugin will load its own hooks, CSS and Javascript and this can quickly add up, especially on a site that is using multiple plugins. Try and minimize the use of plugins as much as possible and stick to core WordPress functionality or custom coding any needed extras into your theme or a custom plugin where you control which CSS and Javascript is loaded.
If you must use plugins, vet them to see which additional resources they are using and try and pick a plugin that won’t bog down every page of your site with unnecessary CSS and JS. You can also use a plugin like Plugin Organizer to selectively load plugins only on some pages to further decrease the burden that plugins place on your site.
Reduce the file size of your images and lazy load wherever possible
One of the most common ways a site becomes slow is through the use of oversized images. Ensure that any images you add to your website are optimized as much as possible. You can use next-gen image formats like WebP to optimize file sizes and also ensure that the physical dimensions of images are not larger than the area where they need to display. For instance, if the largest an image will ever display on your website is in a 900px wide container, the file you upload doesn’t need to be any larger than that.
You can also take advantage of image lazy loading to ensure that images that are further down on your page are not loaded until right before the user needs to see the image. Simply add a loading=”lazy” attribute to your image and that will enable lazy loading for the image. Don’t forget to add width and height attributes to lazy loaded images to prevent any layout shifts that may occur as the images load in.
Reduce the use of unnecessary tracking scripts and analytics and use Matomo for fast loading analytics
Every tracking pixel or analytics script that you add to your site will slow your site down further. To keep your site speed high, ensure that you’re only loading tracking and analytics that are absolutely necessary.
Tracking add-ons like Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are a great way to slow down a site. For a faster loading site, consider a lighter self-hosted analytics like Matomo over Google Analytics. Opt for the on premise version of Matomo over the WordPress plugin version to keep Matomo separate from your WordPress installation, which will keep WordPress from having to process all of that analytics data and might slow down your website.
Don’t be afraid to retest and iterate
You might not get all greens on your first attempt, but that’s ok. Don’t be afraid to try new things to optimize your website and its performance. Also, don’t be afraid to retest your site on Google PageSpeed. There can be a pretty big variation between tests, which can be influenced by the speed of your website, your web host, the connection or any number of other factors related to either your website or Google’s testing infrastructure. If you don’t get a green result on site speed and feel like your site is pretty zippy, it might be worth it to retest your site as I’ve seen variations of ten to fifteen points depending on the test, with some tests showing nearly perfect scores and others showing results in the low eighties or even high seventies for the same page with no changes.
To get an accurate result you’ll want to test multiple times and average the results. Also, test your website for speed on real devices in real world conditions to ensure that your site loads fast for your visitors regardless of what Google’s test says.
Is your website still slow even after optimizing it? Contact us for a free consultation!
If your website is still slow even though you’ve optimized it, it might be time to call the experts for help. We would love to meet with you and help you increase the speed of your website. Schedule your free consultation with us to see if we can help you increase the speed of your website or build the website that’s right for you.