Scoring 100/100 in Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix PageSpeed and Yslow (and why you probably shouldn’t bother :)

GTmetrix is a fantastic Tool to help you optimize your Page Speed and see other improvements, BUT do not get obsessed about it.
Don’t let yourself get fooled by the title. You should definitely care about your site performance and using those tools allows you to identify problems easily. In general you get very good recommendations but you should know when to follow them and when to ignore them 🙂

But if your Site runs slow or you need to optimize Images, Css or Above the Fold Items please get in Touch.
Your Site can go from F to A

Which steps to ignore, for User Experience?

In theory you can see it is possible with a little effort, to achieve a perfect score. But as I said from the beginning, there are some things that you can not easily fix, and I think its important to know when to ignore the pagespeed tool.

  • Sometimes it is advisable to ignore the “above-the-fold” render blocking messages. Yes you can use a plugin and print all your CSS and Javascript to the HTML instead of loading it, but this will only hurt consecutive page loads. So you will almost always get a message about your merged css file and that it blocks rendering.
  • You might want to keep using external fonts from google, and they will load in the header. This means we can no longer get a perfect page insights score since render blocking is active, and it also means that Yslow will reduce the score due to far-future expiration headers not sent for these resources (since they are served from google, the header must be set by google and its not going to be something they will do anytime in the future)
  • You will probably never get a perfect score i.e. 100% for all of our images, because as a designer I want my website too look good as well 🙂
  • If you keep on using external plugins like the Layerslider and WooCommerce which might reduce the score a little bit but offer amazing functionality.

These 4 points alone will reduce the score we get awarded. However at the same time, the real and most important metric will barely be compromised. Load time for the visitor. And this is something that still will be heavily reduced if you take all those steps above:)

GTmetrix