As a website owner, you know your site needs to be fast. You’ve read all the articles about how to make WordPress faster and which plugins to install to accomplish this. You’ve probably added a caching plugin, hopefully WP Rocket (if not, get it from here!), and now you want to know how much benefit you’re getting.
So you head over to Google PageSpeed Insights, because that’s what all the articles tell you to do, and enter your URL. You’ll be presented with a grade and a list of recommendations from Google and at that point, you might be dismayed:
“What are all these red and orange warnings??”
“Why isn’t my grade higher??”
“What do all these recommendations mean???”
After adding caching to your site, you might be expecting that your PageSpeed grade will be near-perfect. Or you’ll look at the recommendations and wonder why your caching plugin hasn’t fixed them all, automatically.
A lot of customers ask us why their PageSpeed grade isn’t higher, or they assume that because it didn’t increase a lot, it must mean WP Rocket isn’t making their site faster.
The simple truth is this:
Your Google PageSpeed score does not matter.
That’s right, I said it doesn’t matter.
Here’s why.
THE NEED FOR SPEED
The purpose of WP Rocket is to make your site faster.
Speed, i.e the loading time of your site is the most important metric along with its perceived performance. Perceived performance is the measure of how fast a user feels your website is. These two metrics are what counts for user experience and for SEO. When the Google bot crawls your site, it cannot see your “grade”, only your speed.Did you know that Google PageSpeed doesn’t even measure the loading time of your site?
To understand why, we suggest you to read our blog post about the new PageSpeed API, which is now based on a different analysis engine, Lighthouse.
We like to use Pingdom Tools to measure the load time:
How To Correctly Measure Your Website’s Page Load Time
Think back to your school days. Did perfect grades mean you were smart? Not necessarily. It just meant that you knew how to do well on tests. But many intelligent people simply not do well on tests.
So just like school grades are not an indicator of intelligence, Google’s PageSpeed grade alone is not actually an indicator of speed.
Here are 3 websites all with similar load times, but with vastly differing PageSpeed scores:
1. PurePlanetRecycling:
Pingdom Test:
PageSpeed for desktop:
PageSpeed for mobile:
Loading time: 881 ms
Google PageSpeed: 89 on desktop / 37 on mobile
2. AnticaTrattorialPortico.it
Pingdom Test:
PageSpeed for desktop:
PageSpeed for mobile:
Loading time: 649 ms
Google PageSpeed: 98 on desktop / 41 on mobile
3. CheekyPunter.com
Pingdom Test:
PageSpeed for desktop:
PageSpeed for mobile:
Loading time: 461 ms
Google PageSpeed: 100 for desktop / 30 for mobile
Between these 3 sites, the loading time ranges from 461 ms – 881 ms but the PageSpeed scores range from 30 to 41 on mobile!
And the below site has a really good PageSpeed score but is slower than all 3 above (note: the website owner asked to maintain URL anonymous):
Pingdom Test:
PageSpeed for desktop:
PageSpeed for mobile:
So you can see from these examples that the Google PageSpeed grade is not a real indicator of speed.
CHASING A GRADE IS A WASTE OF TIME
No site gets a perfect grade, in fact it’s pretty much impossible to achieve, and since it doesn’t correlate to speed, why bother?
If you try an attain a perfect grade, by implementing all the suggestions Google PageSpeed makes, you will lose your sanity pretty quickly.
You cannot take too literally all of the suggestions from Google PageSpeed because sometimes they are unrealistic or impossible.
For example, it may tell you to minify or add expire headers to a file that is not hosted on your website. This is impossible.
A good example that illustrates the impossibility to control these resources can be the “Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy” recommendation showing up for WP Rocket’s website:
As you can see, Google PageSpeed Insight recommends to optimize external files coming from Google Analytics and Optin Monster.
ELIMINATE RENDER BLOCKING RESOURCES
A common recommendation PageSpeed likes to makes is to:
”Eliminate Render Blocking Resources”
This notice can refer to both JS and CSS render-blocking resources.
It’s preferable for performance that JavaScript files are loaded in the footer of your site, or asynchronously so that they don’t block the downloading of other assets on your site, therefore slowing it down.
WP Rocket takes care of this, thanks to the Deferred JS and Combine JS options.
By enabling the Deferred JS option, all JavaScript files on your page, including those minified by WP Rocket, will be loaded with the defer attribute; with the Combine JS options, all JS files (including inline JS and 3rd party scripts) will be placed in the footer, making them not “render-blocking”.
If you enabled these options, and you’re still seeing the “Render-blocking resources” notice, it could be due to the fact that WP Rocket’s Safe Mode for JS deferral is enabled.
The point of “Safe Mode”, which excludes jQuery from being deferred, is for compatibility; therefore, PageSpeed will complain about it.
In these cases, if you decide to disable it to please PageSpeed, make sure to check your site carefully in a logged-out window to ensure there are no display/functionality issues. Same thing applies to any other JS script you may need to exclude to prevent issues.
As for render-blocking CSS, WP Rocket allows you to fix this with the Optimize CSS Delivery option, which handles asynchronous CSS and critical CSS.
When you activate the Optimize CSS delivery setting checkbox, critical CSS will be generated for your website in the background, and added upon the next page load. After that, CSS will be loaded asynchronously on your site.
SO WHAT IS PAGESPEED GOOD FOR?
Google PageSpeed can be helpful as long as you don’t treat it as the be-all, end-all.
Sometimes it can alert you to problem areas on your site that you can address. For example, it might alert you to the fact that your content is not being GZIP-ed (Enable Text Compression).
WP Rocket adds the rules for GZIP by default so if PageSpeed gives you a warning, this might be a sign your server does not have it activated.
Or it might alert you that you have too many large images which could be compressed. This is a good recommendation which you can actually act on: Image Optimization – An Easy Win For A Faster Site
We launched our own image compression service, Imagify, which is available both as a web app or as a WordPress plugin.
So it’s best to look at PageSpeed as one of several tools in your arsenal that might provide some pointers, but your goal should always be to improve your actual speed, not your “PageSpeed“ grade.
You can obtain the best speed results with WP Rocket: get it now, and see the results by yourself!
Guidelines for Using PageSpeed
- Don’t rely on PageSpeed alone to assess the performance of your site. Use it as one of several indicators.
- Always read the recommendations carefully and assess if they are possible and worth your time. If it’s asking you to do something impossible, you should ignore that!
- Don’t forget to always focus on speed and don’t worry about chasing a grade.
- Always use different speed testing tools like Pingdom or GTMetrix to see the impact of any changes you have made on your site.
