How We Achieve a 90+ PageSpeed Score

At 10Web, they guarantee that every website connected to their platform gets a 90+ PageSpeed score. Their obsession with helping WordPress websites achieve a high PageSpeed score is unique to them, which is why they decided to take some time and grant you a sneak peek into their speed optimization service.

But let’s first understand why page speed is so important. Well, it’s no secret that if you want your site to appear on search engine results pages (SERP) you need to find their ranking factors. It’s been sometime now that the world’s leading search engine, Google, has declared speed one of its top 10 ranking factors.

That’s why they’d like to use this development as an occasion to get into the nitty gritty of establishing a fast PageSpeed score for WordPress.

PageSpeed Metrics for WordPress

Let’s start by asking about what Lighthouse is. Google Lighthouse is an automated auditing tool that supports developers in improving their sites’ user experience. At the same time, it powers Google services, such as PageSpeed Insights, which in turn impacts the PageSpeed score for WordPress sites and your Google ranking.

Lighthouse helps quantify user experience and consequently detect performance issues and provide analyses regarding user-friendliness, SEO, and other best practices.

Website owners and hosting providers use tools based on Lighthouse, such as Google PageSpeed Insights, as a crutch to understand their website’s speed problems and low performance in general and learn how to eliminate them.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, they’d like to once again highlight that a solid speed performance is a crucial ranking factor in Google’s algorithm.

And besides, it ensures a great user experience that will satisfy your visitors as well. The combination of the positive impact page speed has on both users and Google guarantees a direct impact on your website’s growth and your business’s revenue.

Just a couple of years ago Google released Lighthouse 6.0, which indicated that loading experience, interactivity, and visual stability have taken more and more prominence in Google’s algorithm.

Those of you in need of some technical details related to the new metrics that have been recently added to the algorithm can take a quick look at the new changes here, and then head right back to this article to understand what 10Web does to respond to Google’s SEO requirements.

Usually, developers need many months and a great amount of effort to achieve great speed results. At 10Web, they’ve managed to automate the speed optimization process allowing them to achieve great results with a minimum amount of time and effort spent.

Hosting Infrastructure to Optimize PageSpeed for WordPress

Having dealt with the importance of PageSpeed for WordPress from the search engine perspective, let’s see what 10Web as a hosting provider can do to comply with these standards.

The hosting infrastructure is the first thing that comes to mind. If you don’t have a hosting environment that is designed to enable fast speed, then you’ve already lost.

That’s why they, at 10Web, have made it their mission to provide a state-of-the-art hosting infrastructure. This is what it looks like:

• First of all, their hosting services are powered by Google Cloud, which is their gateway to minimal downtime, high speed, and security.
• To improve your performance, even more, they offer multiple data centers distributed over 4 continents. This enhances your website’s connectivity and consequently your speed because it significantly reduces the travel time of your data.
• In line with this, they also use Nginx, PHP-FPM, Server Side Page Caching (FastCGI caching), Linux containers, and the latest version of PHP. All of this combined helps them ensure lightning-fast speed. But what’s more, is that by using Linux containers they are also able to isolate your website’s resources and by default enhance the safety of your data.
• To further ensure fast performance, they need to provide you with sufficient storage space that prevents an overload of your server. That’s why they, at 10Web, use the latest generation of SSD disks with optimal storage capacity to guarantee high and steady performance.
• Moreover, they use an optimized MySQL database, which is tailor-made to suit WordPress websites, thereby ensuring high efficiency.
• Additionally, they rely on the Redis database to temporarily store data, which is famous for its extraordinarily fast performance.
• Last but not least, they use Amazon Route 53 for faster DNS resolution.

Now that you caught a glimpse of what happens behind the scenes and understand how they ensure high performance, let’s take it one step further. How about they show you how they manage to optimize load-performing websites?

Let’s dive right in!

Google PageSpeed Module

The Google PageSpeed Module allows users to calculate and receive performance results in the form of a PageSpeed score for WordPress. Moreover, it helps optimize your page in very few simple steps by providing recommendations on how to improve these results. That’s why they, at 10Web, would be remiss if they failed to exploit this option. It’s installed, configured, and fully supported on their hosting.

In a nutshell, Google PageSpeed, as the name indicates, is created by Google and serves as an open-source server-level module for Nginx to support the optimization of websites for better ranking on search engines.

By providing optimization recommendations based on your performance results gained from analytical tools, such as Google PageSpeed Insight, GTmetrix, and Pingdom, gives you the freedom to choose whether you want to follow those recommendations.

But that’s not all. Here’s a list of optimization techniques that you can benefit from:

• Image optimization through compression, conversion to WebP format, and image resize;
• HTML minification;
• CSS and JavaScript minification and merger;
• File caching optimization;
• File load optimization through prioritization of important CSS and deferral of JavaScript.

All of this is already amazing and brings us one step closer to running an optimized site. But it’s not enough to guarantee a 90+ PageSpeed score for every WordPress website. That’s why they include a speed optimization service in all their plans dedicated to guaranteeing an excellent performance for every website hosted on 10Web.

10Web’s Speed Optimization Plugin

Their speed optimization plugin takes the already existing optimization efforts to a whole new level, which you won’t get with other hosting providers. It’s automatically installed on every newly created or migrated website, keeping your efforts to a minimum.

Here are the main components that will guarantee a blazing-fast performance of your website:

• Lazy load, which defers the loading of certain objects until they enter the viewport, for images to keep your website’s latency low and your speed high;
• Lazy load for background images;
• Lazy load for iframes;
• Lazy load for videos;
• Font swap, meaning that for low latency, your content is shown in a generic font to bridge the time until your original font style is generated.

They further complement their optimization offers by offering pre-optimized templates because they’re fully aware of how huge the negative impact of heavy website templates on your site’s speed is.

Overall, they provide 40+ production-ready and optimized WordPress templates designed to ensure a 90+ PageSpeed score for WordPress sites. Of course, you can use their website builder based on Elementor to customize these themes to match your ideas for your website. What’s great about this is that you can edit your site easily via drag-and-drop, with no coding necessary.

Plus, their website builder comes with 40+ multi-purpose widgets and 50+ premium plugins that will enhance the variety of your design options and the functionality of your site.

Does this sound too good to be true, and you’re not sure whether you should trust them? No problem! That’s what their non-binding free trial with no credit card requirement is for. Get acquainted with their services, see if they fit your needs, and make an informed decision based on your own experiences with their hosting platform.

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What’s to come?

While they, at 10Web, are pretty satisfied with their persistent dedication to ensuring a fast performance, they do believe that there’s always room for improvement. That’s why they have set the following goals for themselves, which they’re sure they’ll be able to achieve shortly:

• To improve the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score, they aim to automate background image resizing for mobile devices.
• To ensure a seamless, out-of-the-box workflow, they’re working on optimizing non-critical JavaScript deferral for popular plugins.
• To reduce MySQL load, they plan on adding object caching.
• In the same vein, they’d like to add PHP8 with a JIT compiler, and
• Optimize cache invalidation.

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References: [1]R. Changes, “How we achieve a 90+ PageSpeed score,” 10Web - Build & Host Your WordPress Website, 16-Jul-2020. .