Table of Contents A brief history of Google’s mission to make the web faster In 2009, by issuing a call to arms to “make the web faster”, Google set out on a mission to try and persuade website owners to make their sites load more quickly. In order to entice website owners into actually caring about this, in 2010 Google announced that site speed would become a factor in its desktop (non-mobile) search engine ranking algorithms. This meant that sites that loaded quickly would have an SEO advantage over other websites. Six years later, in 2015, Google announced that the number of searches performed on mobile exceeded those performed on desktop computers. That percentage continues to increase. The latest published statistic says that, as of 2019, 61% of searches performed on Google were from mobile devices. Mobile’s now-dominant role in search led Google to develop its “Accelerated Mobile Pages” (AMP) project. This initiative is aimed at encouraging website owners to create what is essentially another mobile theme, on top of their responsive mobile theme, that complies with a very strict set of development and performance guidelines. Although many site owners and SEOs complain about having to tend to page speed and AMP on top of the other 200+ ranking factors that already give them headaches, page speed is indeed a worthy effort for site owners to focus on. In 2017, Google conducted a study where the results very much justified their focus on making the web faster. They found that “As page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 123%.” In July of 2018, page speed became a ranking factor for mobile searches, and today Google will incorporate even more speed-related factors (called Core Web Vitals) in its ranking algorithms. With the average human attention span decreasing all the time, and our reliance on our mobile devices growing consistently, there’s no question that page speed is, and will continue to be, an incredibly important thing for website owners to tend to. How to optimize a website for speed Think like a race car driver Winning the page speed race requires the same things as winning a car race. To win a race in a car, you make sure that your vehicle is as lightweight as possible, as powerful as possible, and you navigate the racetrack as efficiently as possible. I’ll use this analogy to try to make page speed optimization techniques a bit more understandable. Make it lightweight These days, websites are more beautiful and functional than ever before — but that also means they are bigger than ever. Most modern websites are the equivalent of a party bus or a limo. They’re super fancy, loaded with all sorts of amenities, and therefore HEAVY and SLOW. In the search engine “racetrack,” you will not win with a party bus or a limo. You’ll look cool, but you’ll lose. Image source: A GTMetrix test results page To win the page speed race, you need a proper racing vehicle, which is lightweight. Race cars don’t have radios, cupholders, glove boxes, or really anything at all that isn’t absolutely necessary. Similarly, your website shouldn’t be loaded up with elaborate animations, video backgrounds, enormous images, fancy widgets, excessive plugins, or anything else at all that isn’t absolutely necessary. In addition to decluttering your site of unnecessary fanciness and excessive plugins, you can also shed website weight by: Reducing the number of third-party scripts (code snippets that send or receive data from other websites)Switching to a lighter-weight (less code-heavy) theme and reducing the number…