Optimize website for PageSpeed

2017-05-03

Fast and lean websites are cool. Response time is very important, because everyone knows that the longer it takes to load a page, the worse world becomes. Thats why we have to prevent it.

Things to consider:

• optimized server configuration (response time under 200ms) with gzip and cache enabled

• inline css for immediately visible things

• getting rid of unecessary css/js

• minify css/js and optimizing images (I use Gulp.js)

• getting rid of google web fonts and using system ones

• replacing icons with SVG counterparts

• if we use Google Analytics (which has pretty short cache time😞) we can cheat PageSpeed with following magic trick:

<script>
if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Speed Insights") == -1) {
//analytics code
}
</script>

Or you could ignore some of the above, especially ones about inlining css - HTTP/2 mostly takes care of those cases.

PageSpeed should be treated as a guideline, not the one true way of doing things.