Speed is indeed a crucial aspect when it comes to optimizing a website. Slower websites have a higher bounce rate that eventually leads to a lower conversion rate. A website’s loading time is inversely proportional to conversion rate. Which means, if loading time is less, conversion rate will be more.
SEO experts continuously work on enhancing the speed of a website and the most widely used tool for monitoring and improvising purposes is PageSpeed Insights. It is a tool offered by Google that analyzes web content and provides suggestions to increase the speed of a web page. PageSpeed plays a significant role in stipulating your website’s Google ranking, and therefore, you can be benefitted from the same.
Check your PageSpeed Insights score to get an understanding about how well your website is performing. Once you know where it stands, you can take steps to enhance your website’s performance and optimize it for a better user experience, hence, getting a better score.
Reasons why it is important to work on your PageSpeed Insights score
SEO is much more than just backlinks, domain authority, etc. Google has introduced performance indicators that directly impact the PageSpeed Insights score. For instance, it analyzes the loading speed for the initial content on a web page, followed by all the loading time of all the content, along with time taken in answering a search query. These are called Core Web Vitals.
All these factors/metrics will influence your Google rankings and hence, the reason why it is important to work on your PageSpeed Insights score.
Below mentioned is the overview of the metrics considered by PageSpeed Insights tool:
- LCP or Largest Contentful Paint is a measure of time taken for the main text block or the largest image to load. Anything that is beyond the screen is not counted for its rendering time.
- FID or First Input Display measures the time taken for the user to interact with the page and get a result for their action. This could be clicking a CTA (call to action button), inputting a search query, etc.
- CLS or Cumulative Layout Shift, as the name suggests, takes the layout shift into consideration. It measures the rendering time for a change in design elements.
Following are the issues that can be worked upon, to improve your PageSpeed Insights score:
JavaScript & Images Issues
The first way to improvise your PageSpeed Insights score is making sure that JavaScript codes are all relevant and necessary, and the codes do not block the pages from loading.
The images that take longer to load may have JavaScript code that causes the delay in loading.
The best way to resolve this is to avoid using a third-party JavaScript library that causes disruption in the built-in image loading features.
Since every designer incorporates the visual imagery to make the website look professional and stunning, it becomes an important factor that affects the performance of the web pages.
The average images payload is 1 MB, and it is always recommended to optimize the images in the right size, without compromising with the quality to have a good impact on the Insights score.
Image Optimization
As mentioned in the previous section, images play a key role in indicating the performance of any website. The first core web vital metric, LCP takes the largest image in account and measures the rendering time accordingly.
Hence, to improve your Insights score, you should:
- Size images properly and encode them.
- Upload images in the right format
- Take care of network payloads
- Render the image accordingly
Google recommends including a responsive image code so that the image is displayed correctly and has named it as the Build-Time Responsive Syntax approach. However, going by this recommendation will depend on the size of the website too.
Large websites may not be helped by this approach as it would require a dedicated developer to create image variants and implement responsiveness of the same. Not only this, but it also requires extra storage, ongoing monitoring and maintenance, image formats and different breakpoints.
Addressing Image Issues
Since the above approach has many drawbacks and may not be well-suited for every website, you can deploy an automated solution called “Image CDN” (CDN stands for Content Delivery Network) as it has evidently resolved image issues.
Image CDNs have three different parts: Delivery, processing, and storage. Delivery means how the image is delivered to the user in the least amount of time- which is achieved using the leading CDNs.
Processing is essentially working on the images to optimize it, for eg. resizing, or other modifications are achieved via processing servers that are different to the CDN.
The third and the last part is storage, which is different for different CDNs. Some may have a storage library to be able to upload and manage the images in a simplified manner. However, the aim for every CDN is to deliver an optimised image.
How does an Image CDN work?
- As soon as a website user requests an image, it goes to the image CDN’s delivery part.
- If the image is not currently there on the server, the request will be redirected to the processing servers.
- If the processing server does not have the image copy, it will get it from the storage if it is integrated to the image CDN.
To integrate image CDN, you can sign up for an ImageEngine Account that will extract the images from the website and optimize the same. You will also receive a delivery address that can be automated using available plugins for CMS’ like WordPress, Magento, etc.
Easy Integration Process for Image CDN
After signing up for an ImageEngine account and free trial, you will receive a Delivery Address. After adjusting your elements to include the Delivery Address, ImageEngine will start to pull the original images from your website (no need to move or upload them), automatically optimize them, and deliver them.
The Final Outcome
Incorporating the Image CDN approach, helps optimize the images and takes us back to the basics of the PageSpeed Insights Score, i.e. the LCP metric that renders the time for the largest image/text block to load. This enhances the performance of the website, increases the speed, impacts the conversion rates positively, and hence, improves the PageSpeed Insights score.
