Pagespeed has a huge impact on two things. Firstly the user experience. How fast your page loads has a big impact on your bottom line. Have you ever clicked away from a slow loading website?

It happens all the time so make sure yours is fast

Secondly, the impact it can have on your SEO efforts. Google loves fast loading websites. The faster and more responsive it is to customer commands, the better chance it has of achieving good rankings.

In a nutshell Google penalizes slow websites

A consistently faster pagespeed score shows Google that your website has been constructed correctly. Their ranking algorithm gives preference to well built and responsive websites.

Pagespeed – Thinking About The Customer

To put it bluntly, show Google your website has been constructed with all users in mind and they will start taking more notice of you.

Ever browsed a website that’s really slow ? Frustrating isn’t it?

This is due to either hosting errors, or the website not being optimised correctly. A slow website turns customers away. It looks unprofessional and it’s not what customers expect in this day and age.

Our Pagespeed Service Makes All The Difference

Optimising your pagespeed means your website will load quicker and be more responsive. An efficient website allows the user to concentrate on what you are offering, not what your website is not doing.

Rarely yes, but this boils down to testing, any required plugins you use, and your hosting platform. We do not have control of external plugin code so cannot make coding changes externally. Branding is also very important. Heavy image or video content affects page speed.

This website for example, generally scores around 96% on desktop and 85 on mobile. It is the only website we know with both video’s and Slider Revolution running on page to score over 90%. We chose more visual appeal with a slightly lower (but still excellent) pagespeed score over a simple site with an even higher score. It’s not just about pagespeed. It’s also about how you want to portray your brand

Please note that you should take the average from three consecutive insight tests to get a true reflection of your score – and don’t forget to check both desktop and mobile scores. Server network conditions at the time of test can affect the score by a few percentage points.

Our methods do not involve just putting caching on or optimising images. That’s not enough anymore. With the new Lighthouse core web vitals update rolling out from June 2021, the scoring has drastically changed. An initial scoring algorithm went live in November 2020, and sites that were getting good scores prior to this were dropping scores massively – some by as much as 80%.

The new 2021 core update has taken this even more into account – that’s why we now undertake theme streamlining.

Google Lighthouse has five different scoring metrics, of which the most commonly used is performance, or speed. The other metrics to take into account are SEO, accessibility, progressive web apps, and best practices.

The most commonly used is speed optimisation, which has a knock on effect on the other scores. Whilst it will not completely fix all of the other metrics, it carries a huge amount of weight and it has the added benefit of making it more usable for the end user.

Top Tip

Think of it as a motor car. It may look all shiny on the outside, but it’s not going anywhere without a great engine inside it!

Bounced traffic is where people come to your website and click away without looking at any other page. If you have a high bounce rate, pagespeed could be your problem.

Alongside good content and design, pagespeed is without doubt a big factor. A faster website allows you to take advantage of every visitor. Don’t let them get away!

Advertising Costs

If you are advertising a slow website, you could be throwing money away. Bounced traffic can have a huge impact – in some cases the customer may not even see your website as they will not wait around for it to load. You pay for every click so get your website optimised to see a much better return on investment.

Loading times can be dramatically lowered with a correctly optimised website. We have seen load times go down by as much as 800%. If you have a website that is taking more than three seconds to initially load it may indicate a problem.

No More Headaches

The most common issue we see is off the shelf themes with a lot of options or CSS. These options are loaded up unnecessarily in the background, even if you are not using them. These files cause big drops in overall pagespeed.

Theme streamlining involves examining any commercial WordPress theme and watching what parts of the code are actually being used. Once you are happy with your website and it is complete, we take out all of the unused bulk so you are not loading up any unused code.

What About Optimisation?

Yes that’s included too. You’ll get a fully licensed copy of Autoptimize or Asset Cleanup Pro (depending on compatibility). Your images will also be optimised and your server checked for settings.

Anything To Look Out For?

Yes, some coding changes for plugins can be overwritten if you update the plugins. This is not always the case and we will tell you which plugins to avoid updating in the future.

WordPress plugins are made by third party developers and often the quality of code can harm your website enormously. Even some of the more well known plugins can create serious problems.

We can optimise most plugins, but in rare cases we will recommend finding a replacement. Specific plugins are often a necessity so we will optimise the critical ones. With some plugins it is not possible to attain a perfect rating because this is outside of our control.

Testing Your Website

When working with plugins we test your website across both mobile and desktop devices. Remember, optimisation is for your core website and will be tested alongside your plugins.

If we optimise any plugin code we will tell you what plugins were altered. This is because updating them through WordPress can result in the optimised code being overwritten.

Bespoke Pagespeed tuning. It just works

It is easy to get obsessed with your website’s speed. You have to look at how you get traffic to see whether this process is needed. If you get lots of social or advertising traffic that converts, stick with what you have. This process is meant for higher Google rankings and for a faster website experience for visitors.

Desktop V Mobile

Google Insights provides two specific speed scores. One shows your speed for the average desktop user, and the other is specifically for mobile devices. You have to look at your target market and decide whether you want to appeal more to mobile or desktop users. Let us know your preferential traffic route.

Don’t get too obsessed with speed at the expense of functionality. Whilst speed is one factor of good SEO, you have to strike a balance between speed and functionality. Remember there are five insights scores to satisfy in total – not just speed.

Google insights is the speed index measuring tool provided directly by Google. For newer websites, it gets it’s scores from Google’s device browser simulation server. For more established websites, where enough data has been collected, it is a demographic of real world usage.

This perhaps is one of the most important factors when gauging your website’s performance. The speed can fluctuate depending on how your server responds. Our homepage desktop score goes anywhere from 89% – 98% depending on network traffic at the time of query.

Other Speed Tools

There are lots of other measuring tools such as GT Metrix (my second favourite speed tool) or Pingdom, but I always go by Google. It is their search engine we are looking to rank on!

It’s good to use both Google Insights and GT Metrix to increase your pagespeed. GT Metrix helps you start off the optimisation process. Google’s tool is then used to fine tune for both speed and SEO.