Want 100/100 Pagespeed Score with GTMetrix?

Pagespeed score –  that’s been an ongoing problem for me forever!  I use a combination of Gtmetrix, Pingdom,  Google’s Pagespeed Insights, Varvy SEO Tool  and a few others to check my pagespeed.  It’s never as fast as I want it.  A few days ago it was around 82/64 on Gmetrix. Really not good.

I’m no programmer, so even though I know how to optimize images before uploading them to reduce size, some of the problems, like render blocking CSS / JS, compression enabled, browser caching…..huh?  I’ve wasted spent entire afternoons trying to tweak my pagespeed, looking for articles that tell me exactly what I should be doing.  I mean, really specific stuff – I need code, damnit.

You want to aim to get your page loading speed at 2 seconds or less.  Neil Patel has found that an increase in load time by 1 second can cause conversions to drop by 7 %.  Good reason to obsess a bit over speed.

While there are tons of reasons your pagespeed score is low, some of the most common ones are:

• unoptimized images
• no alt tags on images
• low server response times
• no browser caching
• too many page redirects

and my favorite:

• render blocking JavaScript – huh?

A slow web host/shared hosting plan also plays a role in site speed.  Google has a whole section on rules for Pagespeed Insights in case you really want to dig in.

I didn’t.  I just wanted a fast(ish) site.

So, as usual, I went looking for some instructions I could find and that would work for me.

Well, voila!  Found it!!!

Kinsta had just what I was looking for.

So, what did I do?  First, I ran my site through Gtmetrix.  Then, with results in hand – bad pagespeed score results, I fixed all some of the pressing issues that didn’t seem like too confusing to fix.

Sooo, here’s what I did:

• went into my .htaccess file and added some code to enable compression sitewide
• ran my site through Check Gzip Compression  to see how much bytes were saved by compressing the code
• didn’t optimize the few images that needed it – too lazy 🙂
• I had render-blocking JavaScript – my nemesis, but hey, there’s a plugin for that Async JavaScript
• I had some render-blocking CSS – another plugin – Autoptomize
• there were some browser caching issues – who doesn’t – so added some more code to .htaccess to add expires headers
• minify JavaScript – well, lucky for me Autoptomize fixed that as well

I really wish I had taken a screenshot to show you my previous 82/64 score, but hey, I didn’t.

However, here’s the screenshot of my 100/100 score.  I’m over 2 seconds – but still doing the happy dance!

I really hope everyone finds this as kick ass as I did.

For all the detailed instructions, check out Kinsta.