I have been trying to improve my Pagespeed Insights score, to no avail.
I compressed all my images, minified javascript and CSS, etc. and I am still getting a poor score. Is anyone else having this issue with their Webflow sites?
The post is actually meant to be pretty generic and covers the cases where you use our hosting (Fastly/Cloudfront) in an effort to explain why it’s actually more beneficial to your site’s SEO and user experience.
When you don’t use our hosting then you don’t get the advantages of our low TTFB, which is what Google actually cares about.
But that doesn’t mean that Google Page Speed should now be taken seriously if you’re not using our hosting. If you want a much better (but not perfect) page speed tool, check out: https://tools.pingdom.com/
If you fix your leverage browser caching and reduce server response time you can improve your Google page speed score.
I agree with brryant, that always Google page speed will not provide correct results. You can try checking with Pigdom tools and GT metrix for correct results.
Maybe pagespeed rank doesn’t effect your Google Ranking directly, but the (perceived) speed of the website surely effects the user friendliness of the website of course. We also need to optimize for the user, not just for Google Rankings
I do think it’s weird that (like with @Michael_Messina) there is a big diff for my site between tools like Pingdom (97/100), GT Metrics Pagespeed (95%), and Yslow (93%) on one hand but on the other end I “only” get a 51/100 from Google’s pagespeed for mobile and 81/100 for desktop
The “Render blocking javascript” doesn’t seem to be something that can be influenced by me and neither can “Leverage browser caching” or “Enable compression” since these are all server side settings afaik…
Any solutions for this to “fix” these on a hosted webflow site?
@guido it’s been said before on this, but I have a feeling Google’s tool is outdated and has not been touched for a very long time. You can run one of Google’s own sites on there and get a red “poor” response: https://cl.ly/1g3k1e1Y2z2N
I think these numbers should be more or less ignored as Google isn’t even following these rules themselves
More accurate debugging can be achieved with Lighthouse. The code is open sourced. It is built into Chrome Dev Tools → Audit. You still need to consider the value of some of the recommendations. My Webflow sites tend to get high 90’s on desktop - Low 90’s on mobile. Much of that is based on my intentional choices. Image rich designs with lots of animations won’t be seen by potential visitors if the load time is perceived to be > 3 seconds. They bounce. I save my big juicy stuff for when I already have their attention.
If anyone is self hosting their site. I recommend creating an htaccess file. What I’ve included in mine.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} /([^.]+)\.html [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /%1 [NC,L,R]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^ %{REQUEST_URI}.html [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.html$ /$1/ [R=301,L]
# compress text, html, javascript, css, xml:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 days"
Additionally, set up a free account with cloudflare.
Google page insights are, 93 mobile. 100 desktop. GTmetrix, 87 on both.
Pretty happy with that. If you’re looking to take it a step further. Compress your images with https://tinyjpg.com/. Reduce your images by about 75%, including png’s.
We can all be a sucker for metrics like this, burn time trying to figure it out. It’s not worth the headache.
This will enable GZIP and improve your pagespeed score a lot if you didn’t have it already.
The absolutle best thing you can do is remove unessary JavaScript files and audit every single tag you load via Google Tag Manager. They can be a big drain on processing time.
There’s a comprehensive guide on PageSpeed Plus with code snippets that shows you how to get around the 90 mark.