When marketing your website is a vital part of your overall business success strategy, PageSpeed optimization efforts should be a part of your overall strategy.  Today, Google ranks sites by hundreds of factors.  PageSpeed is one of those factors and is a factor that can tip the scale between your site and your competitor’s sites in highly competitive industries.  While your PageSpeed score won’t make your traffic soar all on its own, it can be the thing that reduces what would otherwise be higher traffic than you currently have.  That’s because Google includes PageSpeed metrics in both their organic ranking algorithm and their Adwords quality scores.  Whether Google simply prefers your competitor’s site over yours or whether your per click cost in Adwords is abnormally high due to a PageSpeed related low quality score, maxing out your scores will help to improve your results – at least so long as the pros doing the job also know that it’s important that the site continues to work.

PageSpeed Optimizations are designed to optimize everything that Google cares about when judging the speed of your site. Not only will they help to improve your Core Web Vitals metrics, but they also help to surface other types of speed problem – whether it’s in WordPress or in your hosting configuration.  Since our processes include optimization techniques that you can’t find anywhere else built and backed by some of the most senior level WordPress development and optimization experts in the industry, it’s safe to expect better PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals results than you can get with your run-of-the-mill speed plugin or speed pro AND you can expect that with less breakage to your site.

With PageSpeed Optimizations, Google will absolutely notice an immediate improvement in load times and stability once one is complete. Since they are designed to squeeze every last ounce of frontend speed out of your existing WordPress setup, they touch on every major part of the site that impacts its frontend speed. And because of that, they’re ideal for every type of WordPress site.

Unlike our other optimization types, the PageSpeed optimization is specifically intended to max out your Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed scores throughout the site.  While other optimization tiers do have an impact on PageSpeed, it’s more of a happy side effect of the type of work that they include than a feature.  Since PageSpeed optimizations are the only tier where we focus on Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed, they are also the only tier where improvements in those metrics are guaranteed.  If your end goal is to improve those numbers, then the PageSpeed Optimization is the tier you will need to do that.

As a benchmark, we always aim for PageSpeed scores in the 90’s for both mobile and desktop.  But that doesn’t mean that every site or every page can actually score that high.  Because of what Google prioritizes in their Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed metrics, there are some features, designs, media elements, and even entire sites that simply can’t get above a certain metric without either accepting a certain amount of breakage on the site or fully amputating some features of the site.  Since we’re totally aware of this, our goal is to simply max out the scores that you can get on the site without that sort of breakage or amputation.  If we see some area where an insignificant feature amputation will produce big results, we’ll definitely discuss that with you.  But at the end of the day, the goal has to be both a site that works and a site that is fast.  Not just one or the other.

You also have a direct hand in your overall score.  If we find that Google simply won’t score your site any higher without removing a feature, changing some design element, changing a content element, moving some content, or changing a strategy, then ultimately, your willingness to do what Google wants will determine your results.  Obviously that’s not a common thing.  But when it does happen, by deciding not to do what Google wants, you would also be deciding to live with the score that they give you and whatever consequences that provides.

If you’re simply looking for an idea of where results land on average, most sites land in the 80’s or 90’s on both mobile and desktop with more interactive pages that may have a lot of heavy content towards the top of the page landing in the mid 70’s.  Most sites, however, land in the 80’s, 90’s, or better.

Yes – at least as far as Google is concerned.  PageSpeed Optimizations are designed to squeeze every ounce of performance out of what you have from Google’s point of view.  There are sometimes other things that you can do to speed up a site from a human point of view and if we find those, we’ll definitely suggest them as well.  But from Google’s point of view, you can’t do any better than one of our PageSpeed Optimizations.

On Google PageSpeed’s test, possibly.  We definitely aim for those A’s and we definitely land them all of the time.  But very media heavy pages (e.g. a page with a giant video at the to of the page) is artificially going to reduce its score and when things like that are prevalent on your site, you might want to consider B’s as your best grade instead of A’s.

Also, keep in mind that 3rd party tests aren’t always up to date with Google’s latest preferences.  Sites like GT Metrix, for example, will use a version of PageSpeed that may be older than the one that Google actually uses in its ranking algorithms.  When Google changes its preferences, the only way that you’ll be able to grade yourself accordingly is with Google’s own PageSpeed Insights testing tool and that is both the only one you should care about and the only one that we focus on.  If you’re ever in a situation where the grades are drastically different between Google’s own tools and 3rd party tools, aim to ace the tests with Google’s tools.

All of the ones that matter, yes.  Google typically reports everything that it sees as “potentially” causing a speed problem.  For example, most sites will report that there are too many DOM nodes in the site’s content.  In non-technical jargon, for most sites, this means that Google feels your site will be faster if you delete some of its content.  While that’s technically true, it’s ludicrous to actually do that.  In that situation, you would be pitting content against speed in an SEO ranking death match and, simply put, there’s a reason that they say that “content is king”.

Unlike other vendors that might blindly follow every suggestion that Google makes about how to further improve your speed, we take a more wholistic look at the site by considering its business impact, marketing impact, and long term cost.  If one of Google’s suggestions is only mildly affecting the score or contradicts an even more important consideration like having lots of relevant content, then we’ll intentionally ignore that suggestion in favor of what supports the overall goal of the site.  In practice, that just means that we’re ignoring the theoretical in favor of the realistic.  So while you might “theoretically” have better results by following some of Google’s more eccentric suggestions, realistically, you’d be knee-capping your site in the process.  So we most definitely do NOT follow suggestions like that from any speed test – nor would you want us to.

Yes. E-commerce sites like WooCommerce, forums, blogs w/ comments, high traffic sites, custom sites, and other more interactive sites all require more processing power in order to function as expected. As an example, a very common complaint amongst e-commerce site owners is that the checkout page is slow. Given that the site has to process a credit card, complete an order, calculate shipping/taxes, and more – often for several customers at one time – the checkout page is already geared to be slower than other pages. But when you take a site that is configured with stock WordPress settings and put the weight of e-commerce behind it, you typically find that the checkout page is also being artificially slowed by all kinds of misconfigurations – often the sort that you will never see in a speed report from major vendors like GT Metrix or Pingdom. And if you’re using a dedicated server, VPS server, or low quality hosting on top of that, you can couple that slowdown with either stock server settings (and their slowdowns) or with just insufficient horsepower for the site to operate smoothly. Ultimately when your checkout page is slow, you can more readily feel the tie between speed and conversion than you can with any other type of site. That’s why Advanced, Total, and PageSpeed Optimizations are specifically designed to handle those sorts of problems.

Yes, absolutely.  But sites with this type of architecture really only tend to gain from the optimizations that we provide as part of our PageSpeed Optimization package.

Our PageSpeed Optimization reports include before and after metrics from Google’s PageSpeed Insights tools for both mobile and desktop.  That includes a full breakdown of the major Core Web Vitals metrics, screenshots of Google’s results, a list of all changes made to achieve the end results, and any suggestions that would either improve the PageSpeed metrics further or would improve the perceived speed of your site.

PageSpeed Optimizations can usually be taken care of inside of a 2-3 business week window.  Depending on the exact nature of your site’s speed problems, the work might even be possible in less time.

Yes.  Our PageSpeed Optimization package does include the option to switch hosting providers if your current hosting provider is part of the problem.

Yes. Advanced, Total, and PageSpeed Optimization packages do include image optimization as part of the service.

Yes. Advanced, Total, and PageSpeed Optimization packages do include database optimization as part of the service.

Yes we do.  But bear in mind that the more custom a site is, the more custom its optimizations often must be as well.

Yes and no.  Optimization packages alone are not intended to provide full site, plugin, or theme recodes. But often with Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed optimization efforts, you do have to tweak some things in the them (in particular).  Those sorts of smaller but significant tweaks are definitely expected as part of a PageSpeed Optimization.

Yes.  Our speed optimizations work the same across all platforms.  Bear in mind that some speed testing sites will recommend that you make your site responsive as part of a speed optimization and while that is definitely a great idea, it’s something that is a larger undertaking than just speeding up your site.  That said, if you do need help making your site responsive, we do offer assistance with that as a standalone service and can provide you with a quote specific to your site upon request.

None that are permanent.  Finding the right fit for the optimizations that are appropriate for your site may take a little bit of trial and error, but they are relatively quick and painless to address and once they have been addressed are permanently fixed.  That is actually exactly why we include 30 days of warranty with every optimization we provide.

While it’s always a good idea to plan for down time when making more substantial changes to your site like this, in practice very few sites ever incur down time with the type of changes that we make to them.

Yes.  While our off-the-shelf optimizations are all intended to optimize WordPress sites, we do often work on sites that are blended with other technology.  In those situations, you typically need one of our regular optimizations for the WordPress part of the site and a custom effort for the non-WordPress part of the site (unless the speed problem is limited to just the WP site, of course).