How to use Google PageSpeed and Improve Your Website Performance
A slow website can frustrate your visitors, hurt your search rankings and can even lose you sales. That’s why optimising your website’s speed is essential. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a free tool that helps analyse your website’s performance and provides recommendations to improve page loading times. At purely.website we offer fast, reliable hosting that improves your PageSpeed score right from the start. Let’s take a closer look at PageSpeed to assess your site and boost its performance. 
What is PageSpeed Insights?
PageSpeed Insights is a tool from Google that measures your websites performance and usability on both mobile and desktop devices. Once the analysis is complete it provides a score between 0 and 100 base on how well your website performs. The better your score, the faster and more efficient your website is.
How to Use PageSpeed Insights
- Go to https://pagespeed.web.dev
- Enter your website URL and click “Analyse”
- Check your performance scores, remember to check both the “Mobile” and “Desktop” tabs for both results
- Review Google’s recommendations on how to improve performance
Understanding the PageSpeed Insights Report
Performance Score
Google will score your website from 0 to 100. Generally these break down to the following:
✅ 90-100: Excellent performance
⚠️ 50-89: Needs improvement
⛔0-49: Poor performance
Core Web Vitals
Google focuses on these key user experience points:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This is the measure of how quickly your main content loads.
- First Input Delay (FID): This tracks how fast your site responds to user interaction.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Checks for unexpected page shifts during loading.
Gavin takes a deeper dive into these vitals in a Pipe Ten Insight.
Diagnostics
Google will highlight issues that are slowing down your website such as large images, unoptimised JavaScript and unused CSS. The report also provides suggestion on actions you can take such as enabling caching or using a CDN.
How to Improve Your PageSpeed Score
If your score needs improvement, there are several key optimisations you can make:
1. Choose Fast, Reliable Hosting
Once of the biggest factors affecting site speed is your web hosting provider. Our servers are optimised for performance, ensuring fast response times and a better PageSpeed score right from the start.
2. Optimise Your Images
Large images will slow down your website. Compress images using tools like TinyPNG and use WebP format for faster loading times. If your website uses an image gallery, consider the image format and resolution too, especially of any thumbnails.
3. Minify JavaScript and CSS
Bulky CSS files or Javascript can delay rendering. Minify them using tools like Minifier.org
4. Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A CDN speeds up your website by serving content from multiple locations worldwide. Our platform integrates with Cloudflare to speed up your website even further.
As well as lightning fast web hosting by default, we also provide tools to speed up your website even further including Brotli Compression, Gzip Compression and the Apcu PHP extension.
Conclusion
Google PageSpeed is a powerful tool to evaluate and optimise your website’s performance. While many improvements depend on your website design and code optimisation, choosing fast hosting is one of the biggest factors in achieving a great score. Ready to speed up your website? Get started with purely.website today!
Author: Daniel Knights Daniel is the purely.website Product Manager, with a career spanning over two decades, at the forefront of the web hosting industry and has represented a variety of leading web hosting companies. Daniel has the core responsibility of delivering the most superior customer experience for purely.website members. His knowledge of industry standards comes through his extensive experience that includes advising companies on infrastructure strategy and architecting and delivering advanced hosting and domain name management services that are easy to use though innovative tools and UX initiatives.
