How the Pros Engineer a Lightning Fast Website - Part 1
The Internet is getting faster every year and Google has made it clear that sites that don't adjust their load time to the new standards will be ruthlessly dropped from the results. However, aside from avoiding a penalty, a fast loading site comes with some serious perks. Based on numerous studies, we know that faster loading pages have higher conversions, are far more pleasurable to use, and the almighty Google hopefully will reward us by ranking our pages higher in the process.
Chances are this is old news to you as we've written about it, talked about in our Podcasts and drilled it home in our monthly MasterMind Meetups. However, we've never really gone into depth on what you actually need to do to your pages in order to speed them up. Today that changes. In this article we're getting down to the nitty gritty and not only giving you the tricks we use to speed up our pages, but we're also going to help you truly understand what matters so you can laser focus your efforts.
Page Speed Improvement Tools
PageSpeed Insights from Google is an online tool that performs an in depth performance analysis of a single URL and rates it on a scale of 0-100 for both Mobile and Desktop. This numeric score indicates how much can be improved on that current page - a high score indicates if Google has found few to no opportunities to improve page load times, while a low score means the tool has found many areas that can be improved to speed load times. It will also report problems that hurt mobile usability, such as tap targets too close, or font size too small.
Over time, this is a tool you'll end up hating as you battle for a stronger site, but you'll also find it indispensable. T...
