PageSpeed Insights often creates a misconception of poor performance. Speed and performance optimization is an on-going battle. Here is an excerpt that better explains the issues with using it to gauge a site‘s performance. It includes links to resources that can help paint the picture.
“A big issue with Google PageSpeed is that it does not measure a site’s loading speed, it simply categorizes it according to a series of performance best practices and produces a score. The problem with this approach is that performance optimization is a balancing act that combines many different factors. No single score can encompass the totality, and so that score can be misleading. In fact, it’s entirely possible for a site to have an excellent PageSpeed score, and yet load more slowly than a site with a lower score, as was demonstrated nicely by Lucy Beer on the WP Rocket blog.”
Source: How reliable is Google PageSpeed insight in measuring the speed and performance of a website?
WP Rocket, the plugin that we use for caching, wrote a great piece on the topic.
WP Engine, the leader in WordPress Hosting, offers users a few pointers for optimizing PageSpeed Insights.
The average load time for our website on its first load is 3-4 seconds. Note, this is on an uncached initial load. The website‘s “paint time” is the measure time between when a user lands on your website and when the first visual response is displayed. Ours is just milliseconds. Once our website is cached in a user’s browser, though we also use WP Rocket for all things caching, subsequent website loads take just milliseconds.
Here are four platforms that we use for all things related to website performance optimization