You’ve all heard that Google factors their PageSpeed score algorithm into rankings. But, you just haven’t been able to score well on it. So what are the reasons that you score poorly, and what can you do about it? 1. You don’t understand what Google wants you to do Google gives you a bunch of recommendations. But, if you aren’t well versed in techie speak, they are basically a foreign language. Let’s start with the headings: Possible Optimizations – this is where Google says you could, in theory, improve. Possibly. Optimizations Found – this is what you’ve already done right and Google is happy with. Good job! Here are a sample site’s PageSpeed results. You’ll see these two sections. Possible optimizations are on top with a list of 4 items. Optimizations found is lower on the page with the details hidden. Since you don’t need to improve items that are already optimized, those results are hidden. The last item on the page is the Download optimized image, JavaScript, and CSS resources for this page. That gives you the ability to download already optimized files. On the possible optimizations, if you click on Show how to fix, then it will expand and show you the details of the complaints. Below you can see that the images loaded from external twitter feed could be compressed. If you’re on WordPress and you’d like your PageSpeed & YSlow results explained to you with actionable things you can do, you can Get a WordPress Speed Audit. 2. Your images are huge Images are the most common reason for low PageSpeed scores. On most sites images account for more than 50% of the downloaded content, so you can get some really big wins by optimizing your images. As a general rule: most images on your website should
