The speed of your wordpress website is one of the most essential elements, after design. Google offers a tool called PageSpeed which has quickly become industry standard in measuring the performance of your website. This report outputs a score, and gives suggestions (performance audits) on how to increase this score, and connected website page speed/loading time.
This book is a step by step reference guide on how to pass every Google Lighthouse/PageSpeed Performance Audit, created for both the website owner, and the avid WordPress developer.
Understand why your site isn't passing the audit, and then learn how to fix it with theory, real world applications, and plugin suggestions.
Addressing failed audits won't directly impact your performance score. Similarly, increasing your performance score won't directly increase your SEO placement (what we mean is that Google's rankings are not directly calculated from this score).
However, passing audits means that your website is faster. Addressing failed audits will make your site load quicker. A quicker loading website will increase your PageSpeed score.
When you increase your Google PageSpeed Score, you don't just get a quicker site. You get a whole host of "ripple benefits". Here are a few:
-The average bounce rate for a website that takes 5 seconds to load is 38%. That bounce rate drops to 7% when your site takes 1.5 seconds to load.
-47% of customers expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less.
-Walmart found that for every 1 second improvement in page load time, conversions increased by 2%.
When you make your website faster, you rank higher on Google. Google will place faster loading sites on Page 1-2, and because 75% of people don't even scroll to page 2, you need to be on page 1.
When you boost your page placements on search engine results with a faster site, you get more visits (and 93% of them come from a search engine, so this is important). Additionally, your user experience is bolstered from a quicker, snappier site and the combination of both of these elements leads to happier visitors. Faster sites, more (and happier) visitors and better UX leads to more conversions to leads. And finally, more leads result in more revenue.
