Pagespeed Guide

To improve the performance of your website, you will need to go through a process that will speed up your website in stages. Depending on your pagespeed starting score and the size of your website, it could take an hour, or it could take weeks.

This Guide Is Written in sections

To make everything easy to digest, each page will deal with one aspect of pagespeed optimisation. For example image optimisation has it’s own page, and dealing with CSS has it’s own page and so on.

This is a definitive guide to achieving optimal pagespeed scores without resorting to often unreliable third party websites such as Nitropack.

Not necessarily, but the biggest gains will be had by optimising your images, correctly loading your Javascript, and making sure the server is setup with the correct cache headers.

Show Google You Care About The Customer

There are many stages to pagespeed optimisation, and the final stages will only get marginal gains. However, the internet can be a world of marginals, so it’s up to you how far you want to go.

Some things in pagespeed optimisation are very frustrating. You could be nearly there, only to clear the server cache and see a load of errors appear. That often means you have to go back to the drawing board.

Be Careful Of Pagespeed ‘Specialists’ On Job Sites

They will charge a small fee (often $100 or less), then simply optimise your images, then install something like Autoptimise. It takes them hardly any time at all and at first things look okay.

What they then do is defer all the Javascript, which at first looks like it works. Your pagespeed score will go through the roof and you’ll pay them. However all is (most of the time) not as it seems. If you clear the server cache, you’ll then see various errors appear. Worse still if you have an online shop, suddenly it won’t take orders.

Google Lighthouse will initially report a much faster website. The trouble is you are looking at a cached version of it on your computer (that was working before they ‘optimised’ it). Google is seeing the ‘new version’ without JS loading up so gives that big score. You just don’t notice the errors as you cannot see them. As soon as the cache expires, or clear the server cache manually, the errors will suddenly be noticeable to you. Even worse is that anyone who is visiting your website for the first time will see the error straight away.

Clearing the WP cache (via Autoptimise) is not enough – you won’t see the errors unless you go to the server and manually clear it. By this point, the freelancer has been paid and you more than likely won’t hear from them again (especially after that glowing review you left them).

So the motto is, if anyone offers you pagespeed services at rock bottom prices, they will more than likely break functionality of your website.

I offer a both a live pagespeed service and a full pagespeed optimisation service. You can also get an overview of the services on the pagespeed service page.

I have written this pagespeed guide as a guide for anyone to access. It also allows my customers to visualise what I am doing to make their website faster. Often people do not realize the work carried out, so I have laid it out for all to see what is involved.

Unfortunately, I cannot answer emails for help implementing the pagespeed tips for non-paying customers. It would just take up too much of my time. So hopefully this guide will be self explanatory and help you on your own pagespeed journey!