Everyone hates slow loading webpages. In 2010, Google introduced a bunch of tools to help measure and optimise website performance. One of these tools is PageSpeed Insights, an online service that analyses and makes suggestions to optimise a webpage. From time to time, I check out my website, and I’m surprised it’s just been bumped up to 99 in all test categories.
Making a good score on PageSpeed Insights isn’t terribly easy, partly because the tool itself sometimes makes suggestions that are just inapplicable or inappropriate. Some people have suggested that a more reasonable tool might be GTmetrix’s service. Personally, my own score target on PageSpeed Insights is to simply aim for an overall green colour score (85 and above).
I’m still working on optimisations, and there are indeed some outstanding issues that I’ve yet to properly fix, or to fix in a more elegant manner. So I’m a little surprised that earlier this week, it seems PageSpeed Insights thinks that things are quite a bit better than before. Did they make some adjustments to their scoring?
On Mobile, I’m getting 99/100 for Speed and 99/100 for User Experience. So to illustrate how some of the suggestions are, shall we say, not helpful, consider the Leverage browser caching issue in the above. The suggestion is that:
Leverage browser caching for the following cacheable resources:
https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js (2 hours)
You know what, that resource is not something in my website. It’s not something I can control. Yes, perhaps you could say it’s still my fault for depending on a resource from an external site that didn’t know how to set the cache timeout more appropriately, but hey, in this case, that external website is Google’s themselves! Google, please help fix your own analytics javascript resource?
It’s exactly the same error again with the Desktop results, which otherwise scored 99 too.
Removing Google Analytics will probably push the score to 100. But hey, I would like to have the Analytics. Meanwhile, this blog website is probably a lot faster than it was a year ago.
In case you’re wondering, I dislike hacking code if I don’t have to. My blog website runs on WordPress, and while there are things I can tweak through functions in custom themes and plugins, most of the heavy lifting magic is performed by Google’s PageSpeed Module. You should look at PageSpeed Module to see how it can help speed things up.