How We Achieve a 90+ PageSpeed Score

We, at 10Web, guarantee that every website connected to our platform gets a 90+ PageSpeed score. Our obsession with helping WordPress websites achieve a high PageSpeed score is something that’s unique to us, which is why we decided to take some time and grant you a sneak peek into our 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 mind their ranking factors. It’s been some time now that the world’s leading search engine, Google, has declared speed one of its top 10 ranking factors.

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

At this point, a little shout-out is due to agencies, freelancers, eCommerce website owners, small businesses, and personal website owners. This one is especially beneficial for you, because our hosting and optimization services are tailored to suiting your needs in particular.

PageSpeed Metrics for WordPress

Let’s start by asking ourselves 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.

Basically, 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, we’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 which 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 few months 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 we do 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, we’ve managed to automate the speed optimization process allowing us 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 we 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 we, at 10Web, have made it our mission to provide a state-of-the-art hosting infrastructure. This is what it looks like:

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

Now that you caught a glimpse of what happens behind the scenes and understand how we ensure high performance, let’s take it one step further. How about we show you how we 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 and simple steps by providing recommendations on how to improve these results. That’s why we, at 10Web, would be remiss if we failed to exploit this option. It’s installed, configured, and fully supported on our 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, it 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 we include a speed optimization service in all our plans dedicated to guaranteeing an excellent performance for every website hosted on 10Web.

10Web’s Speed Optimization Plugin

Our 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 the purpose of low latency, your content is shown in a generic font to bridge the time until your original font style is generated.

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

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

Plus, our 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 us? No problem! That’s what our non-binding free trial with no credit card requirement is for. Get acquainted with our services, see if they fit your needs, and make an informed decision based on your own experiences with our hosting platform.

What’s to come?

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

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

So, after sharing our methods of ensuring a high PageSpeed for WordPress and granting insights into our plans for future development, we’re very keen on hearing your insights regarding page speed. For the tech-savvy people out there, do you have further suggestions on how to improve our efforts? And to website owners who prioritize speed, where do you host your website(s), and are you happy with your speed performance?