How to improve your Google Insights score

Why is everybody so obsessed with Google Insights score? Because it matters! The test results are an important SEO factor, and Google Insights is a valuable tool for measuring your website usability.

We will teach you how to optimize and use your images if you want to improve your Google Insights results.

Use properly sized images

When ShortPixel users ask us to help them with Google Insights scores we usually answer that “one problem noted by Google is related to using images that are too large for their placeholder”.

For example, if you have a 2,000px x 3,000px image which is scaled down to 600px x 700px then Google will tell you also that “Properly formatting and compressing images can save many bytes of data.”
Here is an example of how such an oversized image appears when you click mouse-right and check “View Image Info” option:

Adjust the size of these images and then your Google Insights score should improve.

Use lossy optimization

There are very few situations when lossless optimization is needed. So, we strongly recommend you to use the lossy option if the speed of your website is important. If there is an image that you don’t like how it was optimized you can always optimize it again as lossless or restore it, if you have Image Backup option active.

Check the cache issues

Your website sometimes serves old, non-optimized images if you use a cache plugin or if your host provider has a caching solution.

If you suspect that an image is not optimized, the easiest way to see if it is a cache issue is to add “?something” at the end of an image URL, then the caching is overridden and the actual optimized images is read: https://unoptimizedimageurl.jpg?something.

So, after you optimized your images be sure that you refresh your cache and if the issue persists please ask your hosting provider to do the same for your website/webserver.

Images from other sources

From time to time, you use images from other sources like the logos of various services or hot-linked images from other websites. Check if these images are optimized and if they are the reason your page is loading too slow.

Remember: Google Insights is just a tool

Google Insights doesn’t look at your website, and it cannot judge which is the proper image quality of your images. What it does is to automatically analyze your web pages and compare them with some good practices.

We made several tests, and we adjusted  our image optimization algorithms to have the best compression without compromising the image quality. Of, course you can process your media files again and again, and stretch them with few more bytes, but that won’t help much because if an image is optimized multiple times it will start to show visible artifacts. And that’s not something you’d want to happen, right?

Don’t forget SEO

Image optimization is crucial, but an integrated user experience means a lot more. One of the first steps is to get your content to your public. And you do that by checking that your website follows the SEO standards, that you have a healthy backlink profile, and that you are in touch with the latest SEO practices. For the off page optimization, go to Ahrefs blog. We also found some interesting on page SEO insights here.

Relax

We encourage you to use Google Insights and also to apply the advice from this article, but 100/100 points on Google Insights test is not your goal, having a good website, with good content and happy visitors is what matters.

And if you want to relax a little bit here are some scores from the big players:

Guardian.co.uk – 65/100
AdWords.Google.Com – 67/100
Airbnb.com – 75/100
Makeuseof.com – 54/100
Moz.com – 73/100