Just ran out new site on Google PageSpeed Insights and received a 99% on Desktop! Super excited about that!
Our mobile version is receiving a 75%. Is this something we should be concerned about?
Any suggestions in getting this score higher?
Pinging @hatzopoulos for this one!
My Answer Jeff, WPO is expensive but worth it. It’s a secondary task to development, and at “some” point the benefits of the last few % don’t justify the cost, but there are plenty easy wins in the 5-10 hour category that can dramatically improve user experience (optimization of images etc)
Also note, it’s a moving target, so you might have a great score now, but later it can get worse. They update their criteria often, so if you care about that green bar, it can mean a continued investment and diligence on new content.
Hey Jeff -
Awesome score!
You will find that Google is very focused on images for PageSpeed scores, especially on mobile.
To help fix some of the insights you received here, you can make sure that your images are optimized (keeping your file sizes small as possible). If you read the drop down under images it will give you the file types that Google prefers.
As Morgan mentioned, a lot of these can be quick fixes, but can have a huge overall impact. There are also different ways you can load images on your page that can help. You will find that images are often your biggest win in increasing your page speed load time (and are often the biggest offenders too!).
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Appreciate the feedback
Looks like a pretty big percentage of our mobile PageSpeed deductions are due to larger picture files. We have been optimizing our images as we are uploading them but they are still large for mobile. The dimensions of the photos were really designed for desktop and not mobile.
I have been reading about and started playing with WebP images as the PageSpeed suggests. It looks there is a savings in space but browser support really stinks and it still does not solve the mobile issue.
Is there a solution for this? Is there an easy way to serve smaller images for mobile devices?
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The key is optimizing images, and choosing the right file format.
.jpg, .png, and .gif are universally accepted by browers, each serving their own purpose.
In Google’s article, Image Optimization, they do a great job of walking you through each of the universally accepted filetypes.
I also really like this use chart:
ClickZ also has a series of articles dedicated to optimizing mobile images, with some great studies behind their findings: Optimizing images for mobile: right format, right size, right place, right device.
They also go over about some of the compression tools that they use (we do use TinyPNG in-house here as well!).
Another way to add speed is to customize how images are loaded on-screen. The article I mentioned above refers to a process called Lazy Loading:
This is also something that we can do on your website to help increase load times. To see it in action, you can try scrolling down a page on rew.com.
If you want to go the lazy loading route, reach out to your Account Manager to go over what that looks like for your site.
The ClickZ articles were published around 2017+, so they do not talk about webp as much, but this is the file format that Google is pushing for as of 2019. iOS will catch up, so keep this file format on your radar. You can read more about Google’s take here.
Hi Jeff,
Jacqui gave some great suggestions. Looks like your score has improved since 2 days ago.
Your Google Lighthouse score for mobile is pretty good also.
https://googlechrome.github.io/lighthouse/viewer/?gist=108839c06327ab3bc50cbf78875a7c55
We can handle some of the hard to reach areas like lazy loading and improving the ‘accessibility’ and ‘best practicies’ sections.
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