How To Increase Page Speed Of A Website For Better SEO Results

Page Speed is an important factor of today’s’ on-page SEO optimization. To find out current score and the reason for low score, you may use the Google’s tool – PageSpeed Insights, here’s how you should use the Page Speed Insights:

First go to the Page Speed Insights.

To get green signal, your website need at least 85 points. To increase page speed, you may avoid the complex part “Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS” at the beginning.

Look into “Optimize images” section, click on “Show how to fix”, get the image name and location, download the image files from FTP and use tools like Image Optimizer listed below:
http://jpeg-optimizer.com/

After you optimize each image, upload the optimized images again to the FTP. Be sure to check the image quality and adjust the setting accordingly.

If your website is based on WordPress platform, first take a backup of htaccess file and then use the following codes and upload htaccess file back to the FTP: [if you don’t do it properly, you may not be able to access your website, in such issue, remove the new htaccess file from FTP and restore the backup file].

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
<IfModule mod_filter.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain text/html application/x-httpd-php-source
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml application/xml application/xhtml+xml application/xml-dtd
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rdf+xml application/rss+xml application/atom+xml image/svg+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css text/javascript application/javascript application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/truetype application/x-font-ttf font/opentype application/x-font-otf
</IfModule>
</IfModule>

<IfModule mod_expires.c>

Enable expirations

ExpiresActive On

Default directive

ExpiresDefault “access plus 1 week”

My favicon

ExpiresByType image/x-icon “access plus 1 week”

Images

ExpiresByType image/gif “access plus 1 week”
ExpiresByType image/png “access plus 1 week”
ExpiresByType image/jpg “access plus 1 week”
ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access plus 1 week”

CSS

ExpiresByType text/css “access 1 week”

Javascript

ExpiresByType application/javascript “access plus 1 week”

</IfModule>

Now run the website again on PageSpeed Insights, you should see some progress on the score. To increase more page speed, you need to install WP Super Cache plugin and configure it accordingly.