Google Page Speed

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  stephendove8 · Member · Dec 23, 2015 at 5:34 pm

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  I check the Google page speed insights quite frequently and my score is quite bad. Is there any way to speed up my site as this is a very important SEO factor in search rankings and also causes visitors to click back on mobile devices due to waiting times for site to load. Any help would be appreciated.

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  starxedsteph · Member · Dec 27, 2015 at 6:13 pm

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  Hi there,

  Optimizing your images can help with improving your page speed and is a great first step. Here is some more information on how to do that:

  Optimize Your Images

  Reducing the content on your front page in general can also help with your page speed. There is some interesting discussion on that in this forum post:

  https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/applying-google-page-speed-suggestions-to-my-blog?replies=20

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  stephendove8 · Member · Dec 28, 2015 at 2:08 pm

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  I have read the entire posts from what you recommended and the only thing that applies to me is the images to be reduced in file size. On Page Speed insights it suggests to leverage browser caching, enable compression, minify CSS, HTML and Javascript.

  Is there anyway to do this at all? Thanks for your reply Steph :)

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  starxedsteph · Member · Dec 29, 2015 at 2:05 pm

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  You aren’t going to be able to do those things on WordPress.com. I’ve also not been able to do about a lot of those things on sites outside of WP.com. The point I think the other forum post I linked to makes is that Pagespeed score is a lot less important that it seems.

  While page speed does effect SEO it doesn’t appear to be a primary factor. As this Moz article puts it, “content relevancy reigns king” which is one of the reasons why WordPress is so awesome for SEO.

  https://moz.com/blog/how-website-speed-actually-impacts-search-ranking

  I think the tests Moz did here are very interesting. They even discovered an inverse speed relationship in one area of the study (slower pages ranked higher!). We can only speculate why but I think that’s because the content is better on those pages.

  The other point I think the forum thread makes is that Google Pagespeed doesn’t account for all speed factors and the score can actually vary from computer to computer.

  Pingdom will give you a better sense of when and how long different components of the site take to load. You can check this out to see if there is something that’s particularly slowing you down and then decide what’s worth changing from there.

  http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

  Hope that helps explain things a bit better!