What is Google PageSpeed Insights and Why It is Important for SEO
47% of consumers expect a page to open in two seconds or less. On the other hand, big eCommerce site vendors noted two percentages of increase in conversion after increasing the page speed by a second in their website. You see, page speed is essential for both, SEO ranking and conversions, and Google PageSpeed Insights is one of the best tools that tell if your website is fast enough for the users.
Google has time and again stated that page speed is a ranking factor. Faster loading web pages are necessary for good SEO ranking.
What Should be the Ideal Page Load Speed?
According to Google, 53% of people will close a webpage if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds. The search engine company doesn’t exactly give any ‘magic threshold’ for the page load speed, but you should look into your webpage if it is taking a very long time to load.
How to Use Google PageSpeed Insights?
You first open the tool and copy and paste your website domain on the search box. There, you will get a page speed score between 0 and 100. Scoring at least 90 indicates that your website has been optimized for speed.
What are the Different Metrics in Google PageSpeed Insights?
Scroll below the page speed, and you will see a section called Lab Data. These metrics mean:
First Contentful Paint (FCP)
The First Contentful Paint is the time when the first bit of content is shown on the page after navigation. It could be a text, image, video, etc.
First Meaningful Paint
First Meaningful Paint means the time during which the primary content is shown on your web page.
The difference between First Contentful Paint and First Meaningful Paint is that contentful paint is just a ‘bit’ of content, and meaningful paint is the ‘first understandable content’.
For example, if a webpage has a blog, then the First Contentful Paint is the time it took for the header to load, and Meaningful Paint is the time it took for the whole article to show.
Speed Index
Speed index tells how fast the content becomes visible on the screen. A lower score indicates better performance.
First CPU Idle
First CPU idle measures how fast the elements of a webpage can respond to most user inputs. In other words, it shows when the webpage becomes ‘minimally interactive’ after loading for the first time.
Time to Interactive (TTI)
Time to Interactive measures the time a webpage takes to become fully interactive. For example, some web pages may load the content within 60 milliseconds, but it may take some more time for users to start clicking on various content like pictures to open them.
Max Potential First Input Delay
Max Potential First Input Delay measures the maximum delay that the user can experience when interacting with your website. For example, say someone pressed the ‘submit’ button. The Max Potential First Input Delay measures the maximum time the website can take to submit that form show the ‘Thank You’ Page.
How to Increase Your Google PageSpeed Insights Score?
You need to increase your website speed. These are some guidelines to achieve the maximum page load speed:
- Upgrade to better hosting.
- Use minimal images. Furthermore, try to make the image size as small as possible without losing quality.
- Leverage Browser Caching. Browser caching means letting web browsers like Google and Edge to download and store some resources from your web page, so it doesn’t need to be loaded again when a user opens afterwards. It is the reason most websites load faster the second time you open them.
- Minimize HTML, CSS, and Javascript. In other words, it means using a minimal theme and a simple design for your website.
- Enable compression.
- Reduce Redirects.
You can contact IT Solution Singapore if you have any inquiries about this article. You can also email us if you are looking for a Singapore SEO Company.
