How to increase pagespeed insights for news site using Hocalwire CMS

Customer experience is not always limited to the UI and UX elements and considerations where a lot of effort is put on nowadays. It is becoming equally important that the experience of how fast we can load our websites and serve them with content and multimedia like images and videos. A great UI that loads slowly offers a poor UX. It also takes a hit on the website's performance to rank in the search engines. Google has done extensive research on this behavior and has developed a tool to diagnose this issue and offer recommendations to fix it.

Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) reports a page's performance on desktop and mobile devices and offers recommendations for improving that page. Regarding a page, PSI offers both lab and field data. Since lab data is gathered in a controlled environment, it can be used to troubleshoot performance problems. However, it might miss bottlenecks in the actual world. On the other hand, field data has a more constrained set of metrics but helps capture authentic, real-world user experience.

Increase Pagespeed Insights using inbuilt Diagnose Metrics

While there are multiple ways to solve this issue and increase your speed and performance, the first step to start is using the diagnostic report generated by Google Page Speed Insights. The service tests your website to measure metrics across multiple performance indicators like First Paintful Content, Time to Interactive, Speed Index, Total Blocking Time, Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layer Shift, and many more. The Pagespeed insights test performed on the website has multiple audit parameters that can be seen at the bottom of the report page. The beauty of this tool is that it performs and offers reports separately for both mobile and web configurations. So as a developer, it becomes easy to optimize performance across devices.

Focus on the core web vitals of your website:

A set of performance indicators known as Core Web Vitals is essential to any web experience. First Paintful Content( FID), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and (Cumulative Layer Shift )CLS are the three Core Web Vitals metrics, and they can be aggregated at either the page or origin level. If the 75th percentiles of all three metrics are Good, an aggregate with enough data for all three metrics passes the Core Web Vitals evaluation. If not, the aggregation fails the evaluation. If both the LCP and CLS 75th percentiles are Good, the aggregate will pass the assessment even if there is insufficient data for FID. The page-level or origin-level aggregation cannot be evaluated if either LCP or CLS lacks adequate data.

Steps to improve Google Pagespeed Insights and achieve great performance:

1. Land your audience on the homepage without any redirects Ir-respective of their device. Any increase in redirects will have impact on the site performance.
2. Adopt G zip to perform website level compression and reduce the size upto 90% to achieve higher load speeds.
3. Enable AMP pages and reduce or minimize the HTML, CSS and JS file sizes exponentially.
4. To fix the problem at route is to fix the server response time which can benefit across multiple layers to increase your pagespeed insight score
5. Reduce the number of external requests your site makes or run inline java-script to perform simple actions on client side rendering

6. Google recommends a minimum caching policy of one week, and for elements that go largely unchanged, one year is preferable

The above images show the diagnostics report you to need to focus on first, and resolving each has multiple ways of doing so. One of the most significant performance boosts is compressing the images and mainatin the correct aspect ratio for higher quality. This could boost the score and also the user experience very exponentially. This is what Google Official Documentation offers on what it means to have a more excellent performance.

"At the top of the section, PSI provides a score that summarizes the page's simulated performance. This score is determined by running Lighthouse to collect and analyze diagnostic information about the page. A score of 90 or above is considered good. 50 to 90 score needs improvement, and below 50 is considered poor."

It might be daunting or feels so much to do to achieve these technical expectations set by Google. But at Hocalwire, we have done the homework so that our customers enjoy these technical benefits. Our Hocalwire CMS does the task of endlessly optimizing and servicing content to customers, managed from the server to client-side devices. Adopt Hocalwire CMS to improve your Pagespeed Insights performance and offer excellent service to your readers. Book a demo now to learn how we do it.