How to Score a Perfect 100% on Google PageSpeed Insights

Co Founder of NP Digital & Owner of Ubersuggest

Mar 9, 2022
16 min read

When it comes to building a conversion rate and search engine optimized website, speed is crucial.

If you don’t have a fast website, people will bounce faster than you can say “conversions.”

However, speeding up your website is no easy task.

Your problem could be anything from code that’s written poorly to images or large page elements.

You need to fix those issues fast, because Google will ding your website if you don’t.

The faster your site loads, the lower the bounce rate. If your site is fast, you have a better chance of ranking on Google over slow sites that drive high bounce rates.

Thankfully, Google offers the PageSpeed Insights tool to find out what you need to fix.

Unfortunately, they don’t give you the best instructions on getting your score to 100%.

Here’s how to score a perfect 100% on Google’s PageSpeed Insights and why you need to accomplish this feat.

Why Page Speed Matters

Page speed is a critical factor in ranking your website higher on Google’s search engine results.

If your website isn’t on par with the top 10 organic pages, you won’t rank on the first page.

So focusing on page speed is paramount to having a successful company and a website that converts.

Backlinko recently conducted a study where they analyzed over eleven million search engine results pages (SERPs) on Google.

They wanted to figure out which factors were the most common among sites ranked in the top 10 results.

Surprisingly, they found page speed and ranking don’t seem to be correlated. However, the average load time of a site on the first page is 1.65 seconds, which is decently fast.

However, Google says page speed does matter. There was even an entire update about it.

That connection is backed up and supported by Google’s new PageSpeed industry benchmarks.

They found that as page load times go up, the chance of someone bouncing from your site increases dramatically:

That means that if your page takes 10 seconds to load, the likelihood of someone leaving your site before it even loads increases by more than 120 percent!

But according to a recent study of more than 5 million sites, the average website takes 10.3 seconds to load fully on desktop and 27.3 seconds to load on mobile.

This means almost all of us are missing the mark when it comes to having a fast-performing website.

In another study, BigCommerce found that conversion rates for e-commerce websites average somewhere in the one to two percent range.

Portent found page speed can increase conversion rates drastically.

Getting your speed to under two seconds can increase traffic and revenue.

So, what causes a page to load slowly?

The most common causes of slow pages are bulky images and poorly-designed coding.

If you look at any website in the modern era, it’s likely filled to the tipping point with images.

If you aren’t optimizing your images, you could have pages that take up multiple megabytes of space.

Page size and weight are often measured by page weight bytes. Simply put, page weight bytes show the total size of a web page measured in bytes.

Google’s benchmark data shows that the best practice for page size or weight is under 500KB:

But again, most of us are missing the mark here. We are vastly exceeding the recommended weight.

One of the concepts that stood out to me the most from the Google report comes from this short yet impactful quote:

“No matter what, faster is better and less is more.”

No matter how well your site is doing, there’s a good chance you have serious room for improvement.

How to Use PageSpeed Insights Tool

Most sites run slowly due to large images that take up too much space.

But that’s not always the case for every website.

You need to know exactly what’s causing your slow site speeds before you can make the necessary changes to score 100% on the PageSpeed Insights tool.

To get started, open up the PageSpeed Insights tool and enter your website URL into the bar:

Click “Analyze” to have Google run a quick test on your site.

The finished report will tell you everything you need to know about your site and what might be hindering its performance.

4 Ways to Land a Perfect PageSpeed Insights Score

Getting a perfect 100% on Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool is no easy task.

It’s not going to happen overnight, either. You’ll have to do some legwork and spend some hours at the grindstone.

But if you want to save traffic, drive more conversions, and bring in more revenue, you need to do it.

It may be tedious and tiresome, but you need those conversions. You can’t be lazy and risk leaving traffic and profit on the table.

Here are the top four ways you can speed up your site and score a perfect 100% with Google.

1. Compress Your Images

The biggest cause of slow pages and low scores is large images.

One of the top optimization techniques for fixing image size is compression.

You can save an average of 50 percent or more on image size by using simple compression tools.

If you use WordPress, one of the best ways to do this without spending much time is to use a plugin, like WP Smush Image.

If you want to smush tons of new images for your site in bulk, you can upload them directly into the plugin.

2. Use Browser Caching

Browser caching works by “remembering” the previously-loaded resources so that it doesn’t have to reload them upon every single visit.

When a website visitor travels to a new page on your site, all of your data, like logos and footers, won’t need to load again.

That will result in a big increase in speed when people land on your site.

Try using W3 Total Cache for WordPress sites.

3. Minify Your HTML

Minimizing the space your HTML coding takes up is another big factor in getting a perfect score from Google.

Minification is the process of removing or fixing unnecessary or duplicated data without impacting how a browser will process the HTML.

One of the best tools to do this is HTML Minify.

4. Implement AMP

AMP is short for Accelerated Mobile Pages.

It’s a project implemented by Google to help mobile pages load faster.

It works by making an open-source format that strips away tons of unnecessary content, making your mobile pages load nearly instantly.

If you want to start using AMP on your own site, there are a few ways to do it.

If you’re familiar with HTML, you can follow AMP’s detailed tutorial here.

For those who are less technologically savvy or have no experience in HTML, try using a WordPress plugin.

One of the most popular plugins is AMP for WP.

Google PageSpeed Insights FAQs

Why is page speed important?

Google uses page speed as a ranking factor because it affects user experience. It may affect your ability to rank higher in SERPs.

How does bounce rate correlate to page speed?

Studies have shown that sites that load faster have a lower bounce rate. This means the user is likely having a better experience.

What industries have the slowest sites?

On average, technology and travel sites load the slowest, where local and classified sites load the fastest.

How fast should a site load?

The best practice for page speed load time is three seconds.

Google PageSpeed Insights Conclusion

When you’ve spent countless days, weeks, and months building a new website, you want every image, element, and icon to be top-notch.

When it comes to driving conversions on your site, speed will always play a big role.

To get started, you first need to diagnose what issues are plaguing your site.

Use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to see where the problem lies, then work through their suggestions. You’ll also want to minify code, compress images, add browser caching, and implement AMP.

These are proven steps that can have a big impact on your PageSpeed Insight score.

Scoring a perfect 100 percent on Google’s PageSpeed Insights can give your website the boost that it needs to succeed.