We’ve heard about Google’s thoughts on PageSpeed, and we all know that as a metric, it’s really important from both an SEO and usability standpoint. Although WordPress isn’t the only thing out there on the web, it does power over almost 60 percent (59.3%) of the web. Google even has dedicated an engineering team to work with WordPress. If Google has a team dedicated to a specific platform like WordPress, you know it deserves some attention.
But there something that needs some clarification. There is a difference between PageSpeed and page speed.
PageSpeed is a Google metric, which is based on a family of tools. When referring to a PageSpeed number between 0 and 100, we’re talking about the output of the PageSpeed Insights tool.
But if we look at page speed, we’re talking about the real-world speed of a web page. It’s totally possible to have an increase in one and not the other. Sometimes, there are situations where improving one comes at the cost of the other. This shows that there is a difference between the two.
Dave Davies walks through some key steps and shows us how to optimize a WordPress site for Google PageSpeed.