Tips to Improve my Google Page Speed insight score

First, don’t bother trusting Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It’s incredibly broken, missing things that are clearly there as you have noted, and not detecting things even its own PageSpeed module provides.

Instead, try https://gtmetrix.com/ and https://www.webpagetest.org/

Also, see if your hosting provider has controls in your hosting panel to switch on and manage Google PageSpeed, as that will cleanly take care of the minification at the server level with no added load on WordPress.

thanks James

I have noticed something interesting… I enabled browser cachine and now https://gtmetrix.com/ gave me a higher score on that one, which is good.

however when it comes to “Enable gzip compression” both that one and Google’s page speed insights fail to detect properly.

I tried to enable Gzip via .htaccess with not much change, but the truth is that it’s enabled via a plugin called Super Cache.

The site is visibly much faster after caching and in fact if you go and check with https://www.whatsmyip.org/http-compression-test/ or https://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php they correctly detect that.

my guess is that Google’s tool does not read the compressed file via the plugin correctly. At the bottom of the pages I see <!– Compression = gzip –> ??

many thanks,
Gabrio

did my reply came through?

I guess not.. argh…

so I’ve tested the site with https://gtmetrix.com/ and I have followed what they said for Browser caching and I have a good A with that.

though I’ve noticed something interesting in regards to Gzip compression:

on Page speed insights, despite clearing the cache, he keeps saying “Enable compression” but Gzip is enabled, same thinjg goes on GTmetrix.

after testing on and off compression and htaccess I came to the following conclusion: 1) my Gzip works fine 2) both PageSPeed and GT metrix don’t detect it for some reason.. perhaps bc is with a plugin?

https://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php and https://www.whatsmyip.org/http-compression-test/ both report I have compression enabled so that makes me happy.. is there a way to force the other tools see the compressed version? tried both after loading with cache cleared, afterwards, etc, same result. Do they request a =no-cache?

thanks
Gabrio

I tried to enable Gzip via .htaccess with not much change, but the truth is that it’s enabled via a plugin called Super Cache.

So, not entirely true, but a common misconception. Super Cache’s setting basically says, “If gzip is available on this server, use that.” The .htaccess command basically says, “If gzip is available on this server, turn it on.”

So, by that I mean, if gzip isn’t available on your server, neither does anything.

https://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php and https://www.whatsmyip.org/http-compression-test/ both report I have compression enabled so that makes me happy.

However, then we get to different types of gzip compression, and the possibility that one tester may not detect one type, which is why I always recommend more than one speed test. ??

Generally, if one test says you have gzip enabled, I’d trust that you do. ??

One thing that helped me a lot was using a CDN to host my images and videos on. I have a lot of photos and videos and it made a huge difference in importance for me. If you don’t have a lot of content you should probably not bother with a CDN though.

As James already mentioned above, you should definitely check out https://gtmetrix.com, it’s one of the best tools out there to check page speed with. https://www.giftofspeed.com is also decent and has a lot of beginner articles.