Ways You Can Increase GTMetrix and PageSpeed Insights Score
GTMetrix and PageSpeed Insights are two of the most used tools to find the page load speed of a website. Having a score of around 90 is recommended on both this software.
Well, if you have low or average GTMetrix and PageSpeed Insights points and want to score better numbers, you can do these things to improve your page load speed:
Get a Better Hosting
Your hosting server will decide a lot on how fast your website is. Shared hosting is generally slower, so you can choose to move to a VPS or even a dedicated server.
In some cases, the hosting service provider itself may not be a good one. Well, if you can relate to it, you can contact IT Solution Singapore for the best hosting services in the city-state.
Enable Compression
You can enable GZip compression in your website. By the way, compression means taking chunks of data and decreasing their size as much as possible without deteriorating the file quality. If you enable compression, your website will be lightweight and will load faster on websites.
Minimize HTML, JavaScript, and CSS
Both GTMetrix and PageSpeed Insights recommend less HTML, Javascript, and CSS codes.
It will again relate to making your website size as small as you can. With lesser codes and design elements, browsers will have to do little work and thus, can load your site in a lower time.
In case you don’t know much about coding and use CMS like WordPress or Joomla, use a theme with as little design elements as possible. Well, we are not telling you to make your site look bland; find a fine line between the quality and speed.
Compress Your Images Before Uploading
You will not have to upload Ultra High-Resolution Images every time unless you are showcasing your photography skills in your website. There are various free tools like Riot that help you decrease the file size of the images without making them grainy.
Only upload the correct resolution of images for different purposes.
- For Facebook Share, the image resolution is 1200 x 630 pixels.
- A Twitter Share Image Should be 1024 x 512 pixels.
- A featured image dimension depends on the design.
- For site images, anywhere around 700 x 500 pixels is a good idea.
If you upload a bigger dimension picture, for example, say 1200 X 700 for a Twitter Image, you will increase the size of the image unnecessarily.
Leverage Browser Caching
Caching is another way to improve your GTMetrix and PageSpeed Insights Score.
Caching means allowing browsers to download and store some resources of your website when they open it for the first time. The site will load faster from the second load as browsers will not need to download those resources again.
If you use WordPress, you can download this plugin Leverage Browser Caching to allow your users to access your site faster if they open it for more than one time.
Lesser Plugins
Plugins can help make your website better in terms of design and functionality, but they can also affect the load speed. Always remove outdated plugins. Also, delete those that have duplicate functions to other plugins.
Combine Images to CSS Sprites
When you have multiple images, browsers need to access different files to open them. Instead, you can create CSS Sprites for them- what you do is combine all the pictures in a page into one background image, so that all of them will represent one file and the browser doesn’t need to make multiple round trips while opening the page.
GTMetrix and PageSpeed Insights: Which is the Tool for Me?
Well, both of these tools are helpful and effective for measure page load speed. In most cases, we recommend you both of them to know more about how your speed optimizations are working. As both of these platforms are free, you won’t have to overthink anything.
Anyway, to know more about how these tools work, we have a separate article dedicated to PageSpeed Insights, and another for GTMetrix Tools.
