How to improve your website to get a 100% PageSpeed result - Stage 1
Does your website get a 100% desktop Google PageSpeed Insights Lighthouse result? Have you even checked the performance of your website? The result will come as a shock to anyone who doesn't understand the basics of building a website that will work on a slow connection.
If you haven't checked your website using Google PageSpeed Insights then you are missing out on a free health check on you site, and also the pointers to enable you to build better websites.
If you DON'T get a 100% Desktop result, there is a great deal to learn about how you can achieve 100% and boost your page loading speed. Why would you build a website that doesn't work as fast as Google thinks it should work. What you learn will influence how you ungrade your site or build every other site you work on. This is probably the single most valuable educational web building jouney you will go on.
It is in everyone's interest, except for some web tool developers and of course, internet providers, that websites perform as fast as possible. Setting aside that visitors to your pages want to see your site without having to wait, when their internet connect is poor, PageSpeed Insights is a professional assessment of how well you are building websites. If you achieve 100%, then it is fair to say you understand how to build a website fit for 2022. If you are a professional web builder looking for a significant advantage over your competition, then checkout your competitors sites with PageSpeed.
In the market for a Rapidweaver Stacks project? Then make sure to checkout the project demo in PageSpeed to see if it has been built as well as it should be.
When you build a website that looks and behaves the way you want it to behave on all devices, you owe yourself the opportunity to see if it can be improved by making it download faster.
Google PageSpeed Insights gets a lot of negative critisism and almost all of it comes from:
- Those who distrust anything to do with Google
- Those who are unwilling to learn how to aim for 100%, which is fair enough for non commercial web sites or casual builders
- Users or developers of old or poorly coded tools & addons that limit acheiving 100% - good craftsmen never blame their tools.
- Web designers who use out-dated page builders or choices of bloated frameworks that will never achieve 100%. For example, the Wordpress & Elementor crowd can be very dismissive of PageSpeed.
This site Webdeersign.com built with Rapidweaver & Stacks using best practice, and careful selection of framework and stack selection, achieves 100% for desktop and 96% for mobile and the journey to get to here was a most important and valuable lesson in building better web sites. Note that the site is a complex and real site with a lot of advanced positioning techniques and it also acts as a test bed for ideas so it often being worked on.
So the good news is that using Rapidweaver with Stacks or Stacks App can achieve 100% PageSpeed, if care is taken to build with the best building blocks and practices.
This is the first of several articles about tips on how to achieve a better Google PageSpeed Insights result.
Note 1. Lighthouse provides further web page analysis and includes PageSpeed.
Note 2. The PageSpeed result will itself be affected by any additional delays such as PageSpeed itself, being busy. This will explain why resluts can vary when testing at different times. So keep trying on different times. Generally PageSpeed seems to get busier from Tuesday to Friday.