Google PageSpeed has recently become a hot-button topic in the creative industry. Like it or not, it’s here to stay and is gradually becoming a more important factor in terms of search engine optimization.

“What is Google PageSpeed?”

Google PageSpeed is a set of standards created by Google in order to encourage the development and design of Web pages that load quickly on a broad range of platforms and devices. Having a website that follows the Google PageSpeed standards is one of the many factors that Google’s algorithm uses to rate your page higher and move it up among the search results for your keywords.

Getting by on “just your good looks alone” is no longer an option, web sites that don’t do a good job of optimizing their designs and code for speed face penalties from Google. As usual, the exact details of Google’s search ranking algorithm are a closely held secret, what we know is that a website that doesn’t conform to the Google PageSpeed standards will not perform as well as one that does. This is (arguably) understandable on Google’s part – they want to promote sites and content that will load quickly for all users, so they make that part of their algorithm. As a result, those of us in the web development and digital marketing fields need to start adapting our workflows to account for PageSpeed or our organic page ranking could suffer.

 
One important aspect of Google PageSpeed standards includes the minification of HTML and Javascript code: extraneous code and comments should be stripped and variable names should be short to promote fast loads. Next, Google requires that the initial page response time to the server is under 200 milliseconds (See “Server First Connect Time” for more details). PageSpeed standards also require sites to cache all headers within browsers, which is faster and more efficient than retrieving them over the network repeatedly. Websites are also encouraged to optimize their stored images for minimum size, since images can be costly in terms of data usage, and reducing the size of your images can also improve site performance.

There are many on-page variables determining how well a website fares against the Google Page Speed metrics, but that’s only half the battle. The quality of the hardware that hosts your website on the server side is equally important. To avoid potential bottlenecks in server response time, performance tuning your server for optimal speed is also more important than ever.