In the changing world of the internet user experience plays a role in determining the success of a website. One key element that influences user experience is the speed at which web pages load. Google as a player in shaping interactions has introduced useful tools such as Google
Lighthouse to assist web developers in evaluating and enhancing their websites performance. In this guide we will explore strategies aimed at improving your Google Lighthouse PageSpeed score resulting in a faster and more efficient website.
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Understanding Google Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights
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Before we begin our journey towards improving our PageSpeed score lets gain an understanding of the tools we will be utilising.
Google Lighthouse is an open source tool designed to automate the process of enhancing web page quality. It includes audits for assessing performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO (search engine optimization) and more.
On the other hand PageSpeed Insights leverages the power of Lighthouse to analyse your web pages performance. It provides data from both controlled lab tests and real world usage scenarios giving you insights into how actual users perceive your website's speed.
1. Enhancing Image Performance :
Images often contribute significantly to page size. Can have a significant impact on loading times.
To improve the performance of your website you can utilise compression techniques that maintain quality. Consider using image formats like WebP, which offer compression capabilities. Implement images to cater to screen sizes and enable lazy loading, which loads images only when they become visible, to the user. By managing images on your pages you can reduce the load time and achieve a better PageSpeed score.
2. Minimise HTTP requests:
Reducing the number of HTTP requests is crucial for enhancing the speed of your webpages. Merge CSS and JavaScript files to minimise requests and utilise CSS sprites to combine images into a file.
This optimization technique decreases the number of back and forth communications required for loading a page resulting in rendering times. Remember that every resource loaded by a browser carries some overhead so optimising and reducing these requests can have an impact on your PageSpeed score.
3. Utilising browser caching:
Leveraging browser caching is a method for improving page speed for returning visitors. By instructing the browser to store resources locally subsequent visits can be faster as these resources are retrieved from the users cache. Set appropriate expiration dates for your resources to ensure that users always receive the version when necessary.
Browser caching enhances not the user experience. Also has a positive impact on your PageSpeed score.
4. Activate Gzip Compression:
When you compress your resources using Gzip you reduce file sizes resulting in loading times. Gzip works well for compressing text based resources like HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
By enabling Gzip compression on your server you can ensure that users download files optimising the speed of your pages and contributing to a PageSpeed score.
5. Give Priority to CSS and JavaScript:
Optimising the rendering path is crucial for achieving a faster perceived page load time.. Deliver the necessary CSS and JavaScript needed for the initial page display. Embed CSS into the HTML code to eliminate any resources that may block rendering and load non critical scripts asynchronously or defer their loading.
By prioritising resources you ensure that users see content sooner positively impacting both performance metrics and your PageSpeed score.
6. Resolve Issues with Render Blocking Resources:
Render blocking resources can significantly delay the rendering of a page. Identify these resources. Either remove them or defer their loading to avoid them from causing delays in displaying content.
Techniques such as using loading and deferring script execution can be beneficial in reducing the impact of render blocking resources. This in turn helps enhance the speed of your webpage and contributes to achieving a PageSpeed score.
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