There’s no doubt that such implementation is of good deed to end user experience. It’s very wise for search engine to take pagespeed into account when calculating ranks for web pages. Pagespeed, in other words, the speed (or time needed) to load a webpage, can be improved if you have some web design knowledge. Well, it isn’t hard, depending what are the factors that cause your page to load slow.

How do you check your website’s pagespeed

A few years back we used to have a tool in Mozilla Firefox we known as Firebug’s Pagespeed Measure. Now, Google has made something similar in their Google developers portal we called the pagespeed insight tool. Ever since then Firebug has stop supporting their pagespeed measure tool and instead they encourage users to use the pagespeed tool by Google.

You can use this tool to check only one of your web pages each time, and it may take some time to calculate the results. Well, for content management system website such as wordpress and blogger, you may need to check a little of every web pages in your site, such as your homepage, category page, single post pages, etc.

Here in this post we will share with you several most common problems you may encounter as you test your site’s pagespeed (mainly for wordpress users).

Leverage browser caching

Browser cache is a big topic. You may want to search around on the web to learn more about it. In brief, it means setting a cache onto users’ browsers so that the next time they come back to your site, they wouldn’t have to load your site content (such as images) again, instead their browsers would use the previously saved cache.

Therefore, you will need to set an expiration header for as much content as you can in your web pages. For wordpress users, you can do this via a plugin called W3 Total Cache, which is a widely used caching plugin. It is powerful and we highly recommend you to give it a try.

Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content

This particular phrase means that there are a lot (if that is shown as a red “should fix” factor) of javascripts, css, and other components that need to be loaded before your above-the-fold content. So what’s above the fold content? Whatever appear first on your screen without scrolling to anywhere of your page, are your above the fold content.

There may be some jscripts such as those that needed to load for your social sharing buttons, statistical scripts such as google analytics, ads scripts etc, that take an excessive load time before they can be loaded. To solve this, the most recommended way is of course, remove whatever you do not need or whatever you can afford to remove. Otherwise, try putting every possible scripts to the footer. Very often it will help.

Optimize images

Just like what it says, your images can still be optimized in size. In fact, many images can be compressed up to 80% which is a lot of saving in size. Smaller file size, faster load time. You can compress your images using your local software or via online web app such as tinypng.com (a decent tool for compressing png images).

Minify Javascript, CSS, HTML

You may want to remove whatever that is not needed in your jscript, css or html, such as removing the empty spaces in these files. This can also be done using W3 Total Cache plugin.

Mobile Pagespeed Optimize

Well, you may have already heard of Responsive design everywhere on recent web design articles. It’s one of the rapid growing design for web pages now. With responsive design, you eliminate the needs of a different page for mobile devices. We used to have a m.domain.com for users on a mobile phones. By designing your website with responsive css, your pages will be automatically fit into the width of whatever screen size (depending your design), which means users on a desktop screen or a mobile screen will be able to load on the same page (search engine friendly).

There are already a lot of themes that are responsive for wordpress users. You may want to use them to save your hassles and time to hire your own web designer, unless of course, your site is very popular. Well, Google does recommend this design, which means in the future, it can be one of the factors in their ranking algorithm.