Website speed is more than just a possible nuisance to your audience. A slow website can hurt your website's SEO, leading to lower search rankings, fewer clicks, fewer leads, and a decrease in sales.
By taking the time to test and improve your website speed, you're also investing in the overall well-being of your website
When using a page speed tool like https://pagespeed.web.dev/, the results you get can be confusing and sometimes frustrating but there are a few thing that you should do when you are testing your websites speed.
The insights from these tests need to be looked at in the right perspective to be able to learn and improve your website's overall performance. Getting 100/100 is nearly impossible to achieve and not worth your time pursuing. Aiming for a 50-60/100 is ideal and nearly perfect, especially for the mobile version of your website.
Before doing the page speed test there are a few things that you can do to ensure that you get the best score your website can. One thing is to make sure the SSL is enabled for your primary domain name: How to enable SSL/HTTPS on your Rocketspark website?
You are able to and encouraged to test the page speed across numerous browsers as sometimes it could be very low on one browser and high on another. This is because each browser pulls through the information differently.
Below runs you through some issues that may come up with your page speed test:
Field data and Lab data:
Field data is the history of how well the URL has loaded in the past. It takes information from different users from all different devices and networks. Whereas Lab data is based on a simulated load of a page through one device and a fixed network. It is completely okay if these don't match up.
Eliminate Render-Blocking resources:
Render-blocking resources are portions of code in website files, usually CSS and JavaScript, that prevent a web page from loading quickly. These resources take a relatively long time for the browser to process, but may not be necessary for the immediate user experience.
At Rocketspark we do not allow anyone to change the CSS code of your website but this is something that our developers are always working on improving our system to make things working as smoothly as possible.
Avoid chaining critical requests:
The "Avoid chaining critical requests” warning simply means that critical resources needed to load on the web page are overly large in size. . This is not important at all and has nothing to do with the website but the browser that you use as browsers have a different way of pulling through the website data.
Keep request counts low and transfer sizes small:
This is used to help you identify if there are any large resources, such as images, videos or fonts that are taking a long time to load on the website. This is because the bigger the resource the longer it takes for the resource to load. There are a few things that you can do here:
- Make the image file size smaller, use a third party such as Imagify to make your images smaller while making sure the quality stays the same.
- Make sure to have consistent fonts throughout the website
- Using external links is good as it doesn't pull through the information
Unfortunately, anything to do with CSS or Javascript is not able to be edited.
Minify CSS, Javascript or remove unused CSS:
This basically means the more code there is in a file, the larger it will be, the longer it will take to load.
So, you as a Rocketspark user is not able to update or edit the back end code of your website but the developers at Rocketspark are constantly looking at ways to improve the code on their websites to ensure that everything loads as effienctly as possible.
Properly size images:
This is related to the image sizes on your website. Having large images means that it takes longer for the browser to load the image. When we say a large image we are not referring to the dimensions of the image but rather the file size of the image. You can use a third party such as Imagify to keep the image quality as is but reduce the size of the file.
Reduce Server Response Times:
This measures Time to First Byte (TTFB), it lets you know how long it takes to load the first Byte on the browser. There are a handful of things that can be done to fix this which includes reducing image file sizes and ensuring the code is a minimal and efficient as possible.
Defer offscreen images and efficiency:
Defer offscreen images and efficiency is the loading of images offscreen, the images that can't be seen immediately when loading the page. This is also known as Lazy Loading, where the images will load as they are being seen on the website, this is done by the browser preference, this has nothing to do with your website as you are not able to select if you would like things to load as soon as.
Please note that animated content such as videos, gifs or animations can slow the page speed of your website down.
Ensure Text Remains Visible During webfont load and text compression:
As Rocketspark uses Adobe fonts, the files are pulled through from them so we do not host the font files. There is no way to change the font file size of those but they are very minimal and will not make any difference to your website loading speed.
Avoid multiple page redirects:
There are some redirects that are automatically set up on your behalf, but there is also the option to set up your own redirects. This is done through Manage Pages in the dashboard: How to change my page URL/Set up 301 redirects?.
However, having too many redirects can result in lower loading speeds as it is trying to load multiple different URLS/pages at the same time.
Here are some general tips for getting a fair result on your websites page speed test:
- Make sure to have SSL enabled on your website
- Please have a good internet connection
- You should test on different browsers and devices
Although there are some things that you can do to improve your Page Speed, it won't affect your overall score as much as you might think. You should aim for 50/100, as it isn't realistic at all to aim for 100/100.