ISSUE #8 - AUGUST 1, 2022
Get to the top of Google's first page by smashing your Page Speed score
Why page speed is important for SEO? What is Google Page Speed Insights? What is the Google Page Speed Test? How can you smash your google Page Speed score? Practical advice for SEO specialists and product managers..
Getting to the top of Goole's first page is the holy grail for any SEO specialist. However, getting on Google's first page is substantially different from reaching the top of the first page. Both in terms of results, as well as in terms of effort and complexity.
A good content strategy, combined with numerous high-quality backlinks leading to your website can help you achieve the former. Yet, especially when competition is high, you need way more than that to get to the top of this page and stay there. One of the items that can help you significantly is optimizing your page speed.
And this is where the product managers and engineers of your team come into the picture. They need to have a great understanding not only of how to make a page fast in practice but also of how to "smash" the Google Page Speed test. After all, maximizing the performance of your organic channels is the most cost-efficient path to growth.
In this article, I am sharing actionable advice on how to excel in your Google Page Speed test, so that you ultimately maximize your ranking in Google results.
Why page speed is important?
On the organic side of things, aside from the relevance and quality of the content, Google is also paying attention to the experience of the users. So, in combination with the visuals and the interaction, the page loading speed is the other important component. Actually, this is the first factor the users come across with.
In a professional context, we often don't pay much attention to that, since we usually visit (or test) any page from the super-fast connections of our office or home. What we sometimes neglect is that a significant amount of users have slower connections at their disposal or browse from places with bad networks.
So, if you were in their shoes, would you actually wait that long until a random page that you found on Google results loads? I wouldn't and Google agrees with that. So, they penalize pages that take forever to load, by burying them as low as they can in terms of ranking, even if their content is awesome.
Consequently, you have to make sure that aside from being insightful, your landing pages are also fast.
What is Google Page Speed Test?
In their effort to support you and offer the best possible experience to their users, Google developed Google Page Speed Insights. It is practically a simple test that tells you how fast your page loads, according to their standards.
It is pretty easy to use, as you just visit this page and paste the URL that you want to test. Then, Google will return your score in certain categories.
Google ranks your page speed score from 0 to 100. The highest the score, the fastest the page. A quick observation here is that Google gives you two scores. One for mobile and one for desktop users. The second observation is that the mobile score will always be lower than the desktop. Also, on each page, you are going to get a different set of recommendations on what to improve.
Aside from sharing a score with you, Google will also go a step further. They will also share recommendations on how to fix the diagnosed issues:
Before we go over particular tips on how to address those issues, I want to share two things that I realized after long experimentations with Google Page Speed insights and lots of frustration.
It's straightforward to get a good score on desktop, but much harder to get a decent score on mobile.
Getting from a 30 to a 75 is the easy part. Getting from 75 to 95+ is the challenging part. Keep reading through and you'll be fine.
I remember spending weeks, trying several different things with my team, but we were stuck at 75. This was frustrating and was hurting us a lot, since increasing our organic traffic was a crucial goal and would significantly affect our unit economics. Until at some point, things started to work out for us. In the next section, I'm sharing the things that worked.
How can I increase my Page Speed Score?
So, once you run your page speed test, here's a list of things that will help you smash your Google Page Speed score.
Loop your engineers in
It might seem obvious, but it needs to be mentioned. Sharing Google's recommendations with your engineers, so that they will apply the necessary changes, is what will get you from 30 to 70. The issue is that this is not good enough to get you to the top of Google's first page. It is a vital step though. So the first line of action is to share them with your engineering team. The most common items here are:
- Use certain file formats: Some formats such as MPEG4/WebM for videos or PNG/WebP are more efficient than others.
- Use smaller files: It's quite common that someone accidentally forgot to compress an image before using it. So, now you are using a 1MB picture which is not even important. Make sure to stay under 50kb in all images wherever possible.
- Set certain image dimensions: Specify the size of your images to optimize how fast the site loads and save cellular data for your users.
- Use lazy loading: Especially on mobile, it's essential to load anything that is above the fold first, to minimize what we call "time to interactive".
- Eliminate anything unnecessary to download: Check if there are any files that you require your users to download, but they are not really necessary. For example, do you really need to use a custom font?
- Remove unnecessary Javascript: Ensure that you remove any unnecessary javascript, even if that means that you need to apply minor visual changes to your website. We'll see more about it though later.
- Use an efficient caching policy: Longer cache lifetimes will improve the experience of returning users in terms of loading times.
Get rid of all unnecessary scripts
First, let me tell you that this is the most impactful thing that moved the needle when we were stuck with a 75-80. The harder part is that Google doesn't tell you that. The magic word here is the word "unnecessary".
Right now, you are thinking that all those nice tools that tell you "past this script in the header of your landing page" are necessary. I'm here to tell you they are not. Get rid of all of them and leave only the essentials.
It was hard for me to part ways with tools that I love and are extremely important in data and insight gathering. A few examples? Tools like Hotjar or Intercom. Practically we left only scripts like Google Tag Manager to gather analytics and compliance-related scripts.
And the magic happened. In just one release, we moved from the 70s all the way up to the 90s. Was it worth it? Totally! The increase in organic traffic when you move from the bottom of Google's first page to the top is measured in Xs, not percentages.
A small script-related trick that is helpful
If you feel that some of the tools that require scripts to be used are indispensable, you may consider using timers to load them later. They won't count in your speed score and you'll still be able to use them, even with a small delay. Yes, you might lose a few data, but the impact will be minimal.
Go vanilla all the way
The last piece of advice is a bit radical. But very effective, if you can afford it. To minimize calls and the total size of your pages, you can rewrite them in vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. This will eliminate dependencies with other CSS files and the page will perform way better in terms of speed.
Some closing remarks
It goes without saying, that the above actions should be applied to all landing pages that are important for you in terms of organic audience acquisition. Last, something that we frequently neglect: Since your page speed is an important part of your organic strategy, the page speed test should be a part of your QA process. Any time that you apply any changes on a landing page, you should check to ensure that page speed has not been affected.
Past Newsletters
ISSUE #7 - JULY 5, 2022
How to get your next feature request instantly prioritized
Are you the person who constantly comes up with new creative ideas? Make sure that you maximize your chances to see them productized.
ISSUE #6 - JANUARY 4, 2022
5 things to watch out for when reading product metrics
Reading reliable metrics and interpreting them properly is the cornerstone of making the right decisions on where and what to work next. Here are five..
ISSUE #5 - MAY 11, 2022
Selecting Product Metrics & KPIs
How can we select the right metrics & KPIs for our product? In this post, we apply a simple framework to a case study and select primary and secondary..
The Product Notebook by Manos Kyr.
Once every month, I’m sharing my thoughts on product, growth & entrepreneurship.
Copyright © Manos Kyriakakis