Optimizing the speed of your websites is interesting from multiple viewpoints. First and foremost it’s good for your visitors: nobody likes waiting. That’s probably why Google has incorporated the speed of a website in its ranking algorithm. And to give developers an extra hand they have developed Google Pagespeed: a tool that shows you how you can improve the performance of your website.
Current score: pretty good
At the moment this website scores 70/100 for the mobile website and 88/100 on desktop. Pretty good, but this is just a small blog so it should be doable to achieve near-perfect scores.
Possible improvements
Pagespeed has a few suggestions to improve the speed of my website. In order of increasing difficulty these are:
- Minimize CSS.
Not sure why this is not yet fixed, normally this is part of my default Gulp process. I used gulp-sass which has an optional configuration that will make it output minified css with
{outputStyle: 'compressed'}. Actually, this only “compresses” the output. So, use gulp-cssnano to really minify your css. - Leverage browser caching.
At the moment I don’t use any
Cache Control-headers. These headers tell browsers how long the requested objects (stylesheets, javascript files, images) can be cached. - Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content. By minimizing any blocking CSS resources your pages can be rendered more quickly.
So, I’m gonna fix these issues and try to achieve the maximum scores. Next post will be about cachebusting and the new PageSpeed verdict…