Optimizing for PageSpeed Insights scores on Webflow and WordPress

PageSpeed Insights

A few tips, from a year optimizing a site.

  1. Your Google Fonts, or your Adobe fonts are slowing down your site. Get those loaded up on Webflow and don’t call a third party for fonts.
  2. Watch out for integrations with Facebook through HubSpot. It can add a huge 250kb tracking script, and be a silent killer to PageSpeed Insights scores!
  3. Even little intro animations above the fold can affect your scores. On mobile especially, turn off intro animations on text and graphics, and keep them still.
  4. On mobile, see if you can get heavy assets below the fold. It’s surprising how big of a deal this makes.
  5. Load all fonts in swap mode.
  6. If you are using WordPress, try using WP Rocket. It has fantastic Critical CSS abilities, and some great delaying tools for scripts.
  7. Images need to all have a image width and height attribute, along with simple things like an alt attribute, and images should be loaded deferred as long as they are below the fold (LazyLoad).
  8. In WordPress, there’s tons of stuff you can turn off, and remove from your pages (Emoji, old RSS feeds, etc.).
  9. Images can be in WebP or Avif format and dramatically reduce load time.
  10. Fast hosting for WordPress sites makes an incredible difference, along with a good CDN.
  11. Pay attention to any animation on your Cookie Consent Widget. If it animates and slides in, remove those animations.
  12. For any marketing popups that pop up as the user loads the page, consider having those load on the second-page load, as this will avoid showing in PageSpeed Insights scores.
  13. Again, consider having mostly text and shapes and colors above the fold, and place images below the fold.
  14. Third-party scripts are a big place to look for ways to impact. Can you load tags locally? Can you defer them?

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