It is clear that the faster a web page loads, the better. Not only in terms of offering a more practical and efficient user experience, but also in terms of positioning. The result obtained in the Google Speed Test directly affect the positioning of any page, but how does it work? How should you use it correctly? How can you get the best out of Google Speed Test? We will tell you about it!
The first thing to do is to access the Google PageSpeed Insights page and then enter the url of the page you want to analyze. After just a few seconds, we will get several results identified with 3 different colors.
The red points are the most critical ones and are therefore the first to be “attacked” and corrected. By doing so, the SEO of your page will improve. The yellow points are less critical points but are worth correcting to continue on our way to achieving an excellent SEO score. And finally, you have the green points. These do not need to be touched. These show that we are on the right track.
One thing to keep in mind, we will always have two results per URL; one for laptops or desktops and one for mobile devices, and they will not always match.
Of course, it is important to make clear that what Google Speed Page Insights results indicate are aspects that we can improve. These are a kind of “best practices” in order to get a better score and a better SEO positioning, although this does not necessarily improve the loading speed.
Correct use of Google Speed Test
Optimizatión of images. The images are the heaviest part of any website, however, a quality photo does not have to be so big that it slows down our website. It is mandatory to reduce loading times by reducing the time it takes the browser to download all the resources so if Google Speed Test marks this error, we must continue to optimize the images of the page. The most convenient way is to do it through a plugin such as the EWWWW Image Optimizer from WordPress. If the problem persists, we must continue optimizing the images, even manually.
Response time. If we improve the response time of the server, we will also be able to lower the loading times and therefore the time it takes the server to offer the contents. It is recommended that our web server has a response time of less than 0.2 seconds and for this it is important to have an effective cache. If your website fails in this regard according to the results of Google Page Speed it is mandatory that you review the optimization of the website and install a cache plugin.
Compress wesite resources. You should know that virtually all web servers on the Internet are configured to compress website resources with GZIP, before being sent to the browsers of those who visit the web. Another option for compression is Deflate. It is important to know that we can only compress website resources hosted on our web server and that we have nothing to do with resources from external servers.
Do not abuse redirections. It is not something primordial but if you highlight this error, you must do something with the issue of redirections. You are abusing them on your website and this could even be detrimental to your positioning. However, in responsive websites there are hardly any redirects and only one version of the web so there will be no problems in this regard.
About browser cache. It is easy to comply with what Google Speed Test recommends regarding the browser cache, although the changes we make will always depend on the web server we use. Of course, it is important to be careful because at times we may have problems with updating content if we configure very high TTLs.
The importance of minifying resources. When we talk about minifying, we talk about the process in which the files are optimized so that they weigh the minimum and are downloaded quickly. In WordPress the minification is done using the Auto-optimize plugin for WordPress. Of course, it requires special attention with the minification of CSS and Javascript because if we do it without previous knowledge, we can even mess up the appearance of the website.
Google Page Speed. Google has developed modules to integrate Google Page Speed optimizations in servers such as Nginx and Apache. This particular module detects which rules can be applied to a website and make the appropriate optimizations in the code used for visitors. These modules help to speed up the web, implement caching and perform image optimization on the fly.
