5 Ways To Improve PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals For Your Website

Running out of time to meet your Core Web Vital metrics? We all know that feeling. Here are a few quick hacks to help pump up your numbers.

Optimize Image Size

When people surf the web, they’re not just focusing on the web page they’re on. Their attention is split between the page they’re on and the images on the web page. Click through on one of the photos on your website, and you’ll notice that most aren’t large. If you’re anything like us, you get the website, skim the page, and then come back to it. With most, we end up scrolling past the images. That’s why we need to optimize the image sizes for speed and performance. What Is Image Optimization? Optimizing the image sizes of a website allows for things like: No more background color changing for new images. The viewport, or the window into the page, should remain consistent throughout your website. With responsive design, the image size has to remain the same.

Use a Content Delivery Network

This method of speeding up delivery is a bit harder to implement. However, if you do, it could really make a difference for your website. Consider using a content delivery network (CDN), which allows you to cache key assets, such as images, on a remote server. This can vastly improve performance across the board. I recently shared how I plan to implement one for Mozilla. You can find the details of the plan here. Get Google Chrome Team to Help I know this probably seems insane, but don’t give up hope yet. If you can afford the work and have the resources, you can go the extra mile and get the help of Google’s Web Page Test. This service provides you with a baseline for your website, helping you know exactly what to focus on.

Compress and Minimize HTML, CSS, JavaScript Files

When designing a website, you can and should craft the whole thing in HTML. But to make your web pages load fast, you need to minimize the resources used in the process. As part of your workflow, you should compress your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. If your website is heavy on CSS and JavaScript files, you should remove them from the CSS and JavaScript include files. The CSS, JS, and HTML include files should contain the following: List of namespaces and files that you might want to include. Example of content included inside the file. Example of content removed. That’s all. I know, it feels counterintuitive, but remember that the files you place in those files are mostly used by your users, so they should be tiny. This is how you’ll set your web page fast.

Create Expires Header

HTML code and flash are great at setting expires headers, but even WordPress doesn't create a header based on the request data. You need a way to store and retrieve that information. Luckily, there's a nice catchment-area HTTP header we can use called Expires at Start of Content. You can learn more about it from the HTTP Archive. That header comes in handy when your server doesn't send a location for the page with your CSS, Javascript or images. For example, say you're blogging about tacos. Your default, non-specialized CSS is usually the same for each post. But your app happens to know the city where you live (obviously). Instead of displaying the default taco icons for cities like San Francisco and Washington D.C.

Serve Appropriate Content to Different Browser Types

Despite common wisdom, serving content to different browser types is more effective than not serving content to different browsers. In the interest of boosting speed and making sure users can access your website’s functionality, we have a system in place that serves content to the correct user agent and a unique content-security-level (CSL) for each browser type. CSS: Your choice of one or more media queries applied to each line of the CSS, which lets us select different CSS stylesheet properties to apply to each browser type, giving the page the highest visibility for the least loading time. SSL: A SSL certificate is used to encrypt and protect the connection between your users’ browsers and your site.