Content's Close Cousin: Site Speed!

byjetrbby80316

5K followers

Updated 6 years ago

We can all agree that Content is King.

The potent combination of GREAT content, keyword choice, relevance, and engagement are what are most important. The “Big Four” are the ones that will get you high rankings and traffic in Uncle Google.

However, I will argue that if great content is King, then SPEED is content’s close cousin!

Today’s viewers on the internet are highly impatient, and unless your site pages load fast (less than 3 seconds), those viewers will never stay on your site long enough to KNOW that you have great content and a high value proposition.

They are already LONG GONE. And they never saw one word of that “great content” of yours.

So when you are building your sites, you really want to make sure your SPEED is taken care of first.

Personally, this is why I have invested a great deal of my own time and effort to research and figure out how to get all my site pages to load superfast FIRST.

From riding in the “super slow lane” back in early January, all of my site’s pages are now cruising the autobahn

By accomplishing this in slightly less than one month, I have cracked the code.

My Experience Using Site Speed

When it comes to Page Speed Insight scores (PSI), if all of your site’s pages are in the 90's Google will LOVE your site. Image optimization is one of the biggest reasons for high PSI scores and low page load times.

Site Speed by WA is a wonderful and ingenious feature created last year by our founders Kyle and Carson, and they deserve a mighty deal of credit for it.

Essentially Site Speed optimizes your website’s CSS and Javascript (JS) for you by combining, minimizing, and organizing JS so that your pages load as quickly as possible thus achieving the highest possible PSI scores with Google.

WordPress is a complex machine, there are some other technical aspects we all have to deal with when using WordPress that limit our optimization, unless we make radical changes to the code.

Some of you may find the following technical, but Carson recently told me something very interesting that I didn’t know.

WordPress requires Javascript and CSS in order to render the first part of your page, so the page has to download it. In order to avoid the message we’ve all seen to further optimize by “eliminating rendering of CSS and Javascript in the above-the-fold content”, according to Carson we would have to build our javascript in a way that is not possible in WordPress

Therefore, the only way to avoid this message would be literally to hand code the entire site, placing only the JS and CSS elements required in the first fold, to load in the first fold. Although this may be possible in WordPress (I believe) this is a complex undertaking.

The bottom line is for most sites, I am positively certain Site Speed can get anyone (even those who do a minimum amount of work on their sites) in the high 80s and even low 90s in PSI.

And I am sure Site Speed is currently helping a boatload of community members with PSI compared to NOT having Site Speed activated at all.

However, for websites requiring a heavy load of images (like mine), Site Speed simply isn’t enough.

And with over 700+ images counting everything, this was indeed the case for me. As a result, I had to figure out my OWN process of optimization by implementing tedious manual labor to get my site running Superfast.

But it was all worth it.

Take a look at my Page Speed Insight scores from January 10:

Note that on this day, my Site Speed was activated.

Now take a look at my Page Speed Insight scores from February 6:

Note that on this day February 6, my Site Speed was also activated. In fact, my Site Speed has never been de-activated since I first website first went active.

Ladies and Gents, the proof are in the screenshots.

I will strongly argue that most of my PSI optimization scores in the high 90's were due entirely to my own manual optimizations of images.

How can they not be? On January 10, I clicked on the Big “G”s (the individual pages of PSI) and Google told me what the problems were and where improvements could be made, I concentrated on fixing them, made all the Google suggested changes, and received the February 10 results.

Recently there was even one day (February 28) where one of my pages “Custom Furniture Design” – a page with over 30+ images - received a PSI rating of Desktop: 100 and Mobile: 100.

A perfect score!

After viewing each Google PSI page and accepting their recommendations and implementing them, that's how my PSI scores shot up into the high 90's. As Carson even said, the high 90's are practically unheard of.

I’ve Changed My Mind

You may remember I originally stated in my previous post “Improve Site Speed from 39 to 99” I would publish training on my method. Then for details which I described in my later post I decided I wouldn’t.

Well, I’ve changed my mind.

Due to my latest findings, I have decided I will be publishing this training after all.

Look for it upcoming soon.

Cheers,

Kaju

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