How Google Pagespeed Insights Can Benefit Your Jewelry Store's Website

Google Pagespeed Insights is an invaluable tool in helping jewelry store owners improve their Google rankings. However, learning how it works and what these insights tell you about your website is an important things for jewelry store owners to know.

First, as the name implies, Pagespeed Insights is all about how fast (or slow) your site loads. Slow-loading sites create a poor user experience, and since Google is all about delivering relevant, high quality results, it wants to avoid sites that deliver this kind of poor experience like the plague. Therefore, as a jewelry store website owner, it’s in your best interest to make your site align with Google’s mission by improving how quickly it loads.

Getting Started with Pagespeed Insights

Google Pagespeed Insights works easily enough: you enter your URL and click Analyze, and it goes to work. In the background, Google is looking at your site as if it were both a desktop user and a mobile user. The score you get will fall on a range from 0 to 100 with 100 being the very best possible score. A score of 85 or better indicates that your site is doing well in terms of its page load time.

Understanding the Parameters

There are two key parameters that Google is looking at as it analyzes your page:

1. Time to above-the-fold load, which is the time it takes for the first 1/3rd or so of screen space to load, and
2. Time to full page load, which is how long it takes the browser to completely load the page from the moment the browser requests it.

Making Sense of the Issues

When Google is done analyzing your page, it will create a report with the most glaring issues in red, followed by serious issues in yellow, and points your site “passed” in green. But the error messages can be a bit difficult to deconstruct.

While the issues that Google encounters are unique to every site, there are some steps that you can take right away to not only improve your page load speed, but also your site’s credibility, making it a more well-rounded and relevant experience for your users. Here are some of the most common Pagespeed Insights errors that jewelry store websites face, and how to fix them.

Your Landing Page Redirects the User Depending on their Device

Back in the early days of mobile optimization, it was common to have a separate site just for mobile versions. These days, having a separate mobile-optimized page isn’t necessary, because entire websites can be designed to be responsive; that is, to take into account mobile screen space on a variety of devices, created both now and in the future.

This way, there’s no need to create a separate experience just for mobile users. And because responsive sites create a better overall user experience, Google tends to rank them higher than those which are not responsive.

You Don’t Use GZIP Compression

GZIP compression is a type of compression that can be enabled at the server level, and it’s designed to serve highly compressed files to the browser. The quality of the files isn’t diminished in any way, but it absolutely makes a difference in terms of how fast your site loads. To enable this on your own server, contact your web hosting company.

You’re Not Putting the Most Important Information Above the Fold

The first third of screen space is the most important when it comes to page load time (and also attracting your visitors’ attention!). For that reason, make sure that the most important information is noticed first. While this isn’t specifically about speed and page loading, it is about what’s called “perceived performance”.  

If the most important information loads above the fold, the user has the impression that the page is loading faster. It may not actually be any faster, but the perception is there, and visitors will stick around for that.

You’re Not Optimizing from the Server Side

Sometimes, the Pagespeed Insights errors you get aren’t actually your fault at all, but rather a sluggish server. There are several things that your web hosting company can easily do from their end to help speed up your site, including optimizing:

• Frameworks
• Libraries
• Database queries
• Server resources and
• Server memory

Work with the Professionals to Get Your Site Up to Speed

In addition to the tips you’ve learned here, working with GemFind can help get your site “up to speed” as well. Our expert designers and professional optimization team know how to speed up even the most sluggish site, so that all of your jewelry products shine with the brilliance and beauty they deserve! To learn more, contact our sales team for a free consultation today and let us help you discover all the benefits of a better ranking through a faster-loading website!