Gtmetrix tips to increase website score that I have used to improve my site performance because performing my website analysis every now and then with gtmetrix have helped me a lot. Some people think that once you've done your site's analysis and a round of optimization is enough to make your site load fast forever – but sadly, that's not true.
Most websites for many reasons don’t know why constant monitoring of their site's performance is recommended: I perform web analytics on my site three to four times a day to make sure that the speed and/or related criteria that will allow my site to function properly are well optimized and you too can
The Speed Index
The speed ​​Index (SI) is a performance metric gtmetrix uses to measures how quickly a page wraps visually perfected above the fold..The speed ​​Index differs from other metrics like First Contentful Paint (FCP) or Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) because it depends on the browser's viewport size and is not a milestone in the page load timeline. Rather, it is a calculation that reflects the experience of page visitors using frame-by-frame analysis of page load behavior. The Speed Index is closely related to the loading times of other pages. This makes it a useful general benchmark for evaluating the performance of your website as a whole.
Unpredictable Internet
The internet is unpredictable because your website may respond to confirmation that it is working, but real users may be slower to navigate through your site. That's why it's a good idea to monitor performance by actually loading the entire page in a real browser with gtmetrix tips to increase website score.
Your website is made up of many moving parts; Front-end/back-end code, servers hosted on it, content (including images, videos, etc.), third-party add-ons (like social media and email integrations, followers marketing tracking, etc) and possibly much more. Any of these things can change unexpectedly – and with that, your page load times can be affected.
Why you should monitor your website
As the digital businesses grows around the world, Internet users are seeing significantly faster website loading times than ever before because everyone want to ensure their site loads fast. Page load time is an important part of a website's user experience. According to research, almost half of internet users abandon any website if it doesn't load within 3 seconds. 79% of users who experience website performance issues never return to the website again. You know what that means because you are losing conversions from your website visitors. The result is a few seconds difference in load times and a huge loss of potential sales. Some of the popular tools like GTMetrix, WebPageTest, and Pingdom provide valuable insight into how fast your website loads and what you can do to improve your website load time to keep your visitor.
What is GTmetrix
Carbon60 are the developer of gtmetrix as a tool for customers to easily test the page load and performance of their webpages and the gtmetrix tips to increase website score is ​​one of the popular ways you can use their website optimization tools that provides detailed website performance reports. Analyze page performance based on Google Page Speed ​​and Yslow Score. Calculate the average score of the two criteria and rank the corresponding letters (A, B, C…). Know how your website is loading and provide suggestions to help you optimize it. It can be used for monitoring page performance, analyzing real-world mobile device performance data, cross-region testing, data storage, authentication, and security features.
Gtmetrix monitoring summary
GTmetrix don’t only help you optimize your site's performance, but it can also ensure that your site is always performing as you expect with monitoring and alerts.
GTmetrix's report page neatly summarizes your site's performance based on key page load speed metrics.
Analyze your pages with Google Lighthouse to get useful insights to optimize performance
Achieve performance milestones like peak content paint, total block time, and cumulative layout changes
Focus on the performance metrics that matter most to your visitor experience
Gtmetrix is a premium application but you can get started for free with the fermium version and gain tremendously! The Basic / Free account allows you to monitor 1 URL per day from their default Vancouver
GTmetrix Saver Locations
With gtmetrix you can test your page in one of their many global test centers which is currently eighty two testing servers in operation in twenty two countries around the world. As a logged-in users, you can use one of their seven free test sites to analyze your page. GTmetrix PRO plan gives you access to 15 additional premium test sites. You can select a location on the Analysis Options tab of the toolbar or change the default location on the Account page. If by any means you are concerned about GTmetrix requests affecting your analysis or being blocked by your firewall, you can allow or deny their servers using the IP addresses provided.
Gtmetrix tips to increase website score
For any reason you get poor result from gtmetrix on your website performance and load speed which is not that common on gtmetrix if you have done your site optimization properly as it is on page speed insight by google, below are my recommendation on what to do immediately that will improve your website performance
1. Image optimization
As a developer or website owner, we all know that high-resolution images consume a lot of bandwidth when uploading or downloading them. If you have these images on your site, there is no doubt that it will affect the speed of loading pages on your site. There are ways to compress website images without losing image quality so that websites load faster. As a result, the image's file size will be smaller, which will ultimately allow your site pages to load faster. Images still make up the majority of HTTP requests, but optimizing images and other elements will eventually reduce their size and improve the overall performance of your site.
2. CSS optimization
CSS and JavaScript have made the web experience richer without sacrificing too much performance. We recommend using only one CSS and avoiding additional CSS files. You can also improve performance by splitting your CSS in two. A small inline part that formats the component to display without scrolling and an external part that can be undone.
You can easily reduce code size and load time by using fewer declarations and statements. The popularity of CSS and JavaScript has enhanced the web experience without significantly sacrificing performance. Use only one CSS and avoid additional CSS files. You can also improve performance by splitting your CSS into two parts. A small inline section for styling elements at the top of the page and an outer section that can be pushed back. You can easily reduce code size and load time by using fewer declarations and statements.
3. Minification
One of the best ways of optimizing your site's speed is reducing the number of client-server requests to display your site's content. This can be achieved by optimizing and minimizing lines of code as much as possible. According to Google, any JavaScript larger than 4096 bytes can be minified without problems on the user side. Beyond this, simply removing extra whitespace and managing code readability will keep your code concise and average.
4. Browser Caching
Browser caching allows website content to be loaded once to your hard drive's cache or clipboard. After loading a page, the page file is stored in cache or temporary storage. This means that the next time a browser visits the site, it can load the page without sending another HTTP request to the server, so subsequent pages load faster. According to one study, 40-60% of his daily visitors to the website have an empty cache. The cache expiry can be set for at least a week, preferably a year into the future. Enabling browser caching is important for improving web performance.
5. Minimization of HTTP Requests
HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) requests are activated whenever a browser receives a page, file, or image from a web server when a user visits a website. Recent studies show that these requests typically account for about 80% of web page load times. The browser further limits requests to 4-6 synchronous connections per domain. This means you cannot download more than 30 resources at the same time. This means that if there are a lot of HTTP requests, it will have to load. Web pages take longer to load because it takes longer to navigate through the pages and fetch them all.
6. Compression
Compression is a basic approach to saving bandwidth on your website activities and speeding up your site. Some web pages exceed 100 KB in size, which slows down the loading times. The ideal way to ensure your website loads faster is to use the compression method and “archive” it. Most web servers can call a third-party module or use a built-in routine to Gzip the document before sending it for download. This can reduce download times by about 70%.
7. Use Content delivery network (CDN)
A content delivery network (CDN) is a distributed server system used in multiple data centers on the Internet. Deliver highly available content to end users to increase page load times, get closer to users, and reduce content load times. Reducing page load time is one of the most effective ways to speed up it. Hosting media on a content delivery network is one of the most ideal approaches to speeding up a website, often saving up to 60% bandwidth and cutting the number of requests on a website in half.
8. Monitor Your site Performance
It is important to monitor the performance of your website. You can also run quick tests to see results when updating code or content on your site. It is also important to set benchmarks if you are looking to improve the performance of your website. Without standards, you don't know how much you need to improve your website.
- Monitor site performance with scheduled monitoring and visualize it with interactive charts.
- Set up alerts for notifications when your site is underperforming.
- A waterfall charts give you a detailed look at how your page loads.
- Monitor pages and run tests daily, weekly or monthly to ensure optimal performance
- Visualize performance with page Time, Page Size & Number of Requests, and Performance Score and Structure
- Zoom, rotate and set date ranges to find specific performance history
- Annotate areas of interest on your chart and provide context to your data
- Set alerts with multiple conditions based on Web Vitals, Page Timings, Total Page Size, and more.
Final thought
Every business, regardless of industry or niche, needs a website to provide a great user experience. Websites that satisfy new or repeat customers perform better than those that don't. As users' online behavior continues to change, the importance of website loading speed cannot be ignored. If your website loads slowly, users may lose interest in your business, return to search results, and then go to your competitor's website.
Thank you for reading, hope this article is helpful? Let’s have your thought in the comment section… SHALOM
