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Website Speed Optimization

Website speed has been a crucial part of Google’s algorithm for a long time. Aside from having an impact on search engine optimization (SEO), optimizing for speed gives a better User Experience (UX) and translates traffic into leads and purchases. Our team believes that a fast website is a crucial part in our mission of accessibility and responsiveness, so we stop at nothing to make your site fast.

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Website Speed's Impact on SEO

Since 2010, Google has factored site speed (commonly referred to as performance) into their ranking algorithm. Since then, performance has only become more important and optimizing performance is a major part of SEO. Google understands and emphasizes the importance of the user experience, a major part of which is site performance, so it’s important to have a fast site if you want to rank.
Aside from SEO reasons, Google knows (and so should you) that users don’t stay on slow sites. If they don’t stay, they can’t convert, and they don’t find the content they need.

Chart showing how site speed negatively impacts rankings
This chart explains how performance can negatively impact interactions
(source: Search Engine Land)
Screenshot of Google Lighthouse being used in a Chrome browser

How Website Speed Is Tested

Website speed can be tested multiple ways, and the best way depends on what you’re trying to test for. To get a good base level understanding of site performance, we use Google’s Lighthouse. There are multiple ways to use this tool, including in the browser, in the browser devtools, and by using a command line extension. We built a special program based on the command line extension that audits sites holistically and provides us with an average score across pages - this is how we audit our partner’s sites.

GTMetrix is another popular tool that provides great insights and ways to address site speed issues.

Core Web Vitals is the tool provided by Google in Search Console. This tool measures pages and assigns them a score based on actual performance with data gathered from devices that have opted in. This is a great way to get real-world insights to your site’s performance, and, importantly, lets you see what Google is seeing so you can optimize speed correctly. Testing from your machine or our server probably won’t show the same results as what users will see “in the wild”, so it’s important to obtain this perspective.

What's a Good Lighthouse Score?

Typically, you want to shoot for 90 in the performance category. This will typically mean your site has a load time of 3 seconds or less across most devices across most networks - that 3 seconds is a threshold that Google uses in their ranking algorithm.

The Performance score is calculated according to 5 tests (or audits) that are weighted. See the table for the weights according to Google.

Audit Weight
Total Blocking Time 30%
Largest Contentful Paint 25%
Cumulative Layout Shift 25%
Speed Index 10%
First Contentful Paint 10%

Some of these audit titles may sound confusing, but what you need to know now is that they are all different factors that impact how quickly a site loads. Some of them reflect how quick the server is (first contentful paint, speed index), some of them reflect how the code is structured (cumulative layout shift, largest contentful paint), and others reflect how code & assets are optimized to run & load in a client’s browser (largest contentful paint, total blocking time).

What’s a Good Core Web Vitals Score?

Core Web Vitals (CWV) “buckets” scores into three categories: Good, Needs Improvement, and Poor. These categories reflect Lighthouse scores in specific categories, so a passing score in one category and a failing score in another may make that page rank as “Needs Improvement”. CWV also scores desktop and mobile scores separately, so what we typically see is that desktop performance is better than mobile. Our goal is to get our partner’s sites to 90% of their pages landing in the “Good” category on both desktop and mobile.

Screenshot of a Core Web Vitals report from Google Search Console
A Core Web Vitals Report from Google Search Console
Core Web Vitals Loop
The Continuous Improvement Cycle as applied to Core Web Vitals contains 3 distinct steps, as outlined in this web.dev article

Core Web Vitals Optimization

Optimizing for core web vitals is a lot like optimizing for Lighthouse - the same metrics inform what actions should be taken and when. However, it’s a little different because, as mentioned earlier, CWV uses real world data to calculate scores. When Google Search Console detects an issue, it starts by letting you know. It tells you what pages are affected and what categories they’re failing in. Then, we take action to address, test, and implement changes that improve those scores. After making those changes, we tell Google Search Console that we have addressed the issue, and the core web vitals tool starts to look for the changes. It can take up to 28 days for changes to reflect in CWV. This process can be referred to as "Continuous Improvement" because the metrics are not binary, they are ever changing and how they are addressed is fluid, too.

Website Speed Optimization Tools & Tactics

The best tool we’ve used for speed optimization is no contest - Lighthouse has been used on every site we’ve ever built and has informed a lot of post-publishing work for us. If you know how to read what it tells you, Lighthouse tells you exactly what needs to happen to get a passing score.

Other tools that we like are GT Metrix, Pagespeed Metrics (which also uses Lighthouse), and Pingdom.

Some of the most common first steps to optimizing for speed are:

Compressing images and using next-gen image formats (like .webp)
Minifying assets (like CSS and JavaScript)
Improving Server Speed
Improving Code Structure

These optimizations are so common that we do all these for every website, right out of the box. For more advanced optimization, we take a few extra steps to perfect performance.

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