The Truth About PageSpeed Insights & Cache Plugins—Everything You Need to Know
If you are a webmaster and run your website, you’ve probably encountered these terms: PageSpeed Insights and cache plugins. But do you know their relevance in website management? As a website owner, you must be wondering how to improve user experience at your site when your competitors are already striving to make their websites aesthetically pleasant.
Well, let me tell you, making a website visually attractive alone does not increase your chances of gaining conversions and online visibility. It is the user experience that makes your website easy to use and SEO that makes your site easy to find online. A good user experience at your site retains traffic and maintains the position that SEO built.
In your journey toward expanding your online visibility, you will find both PageSpeed Insights and cache plugins are intertwined terms. PageSpeed Insights is a tool made by Google that helps you find loopholes in your website and how you can improve your page loading times. A cache plugin is a useful tool that you can implement to see remarkable improvements in your website performance.
In this blog, you will find out why you should give priority to your PageSpeed Insights scores. You will also be introduced to some powerful cache plugins that can help you optimize your website performance and improve user experience at your site. You will also be introduced to RabbitLoader which is the best-known solution to amplify your PageSpeed Insights scores and boost your SEO efforts.
All You Need to Know About PageSpeed Insights
Speeding up your website is not easy, as it requires hours of hard work and investment in resources. However, finding the problem that is slowing down your site and frustrating your visitors is a difficult job. Thankfully, Google has come up with a solution to answer all your worries.
Back in 2010, Google came up with an initiative known as PageSpeed Insights, which is a handy tool for webmasters like you. PageSpeed Insights helps you evaluate the performance of your website and find out what issues are causing your site to slow down. The reports generated by PageSpeed Insights assess the user experience at your website on both desktop and mobile devices.
Google collects two types of information, including lab data and field data, to assess the user experience at your site. Lab data is collected in a controlled environment that locates the debugging issues. On the other hand, field data is gathered from practical users by collecting real-world experiences users confronted at your site.
To make this simple for you, Google PageSpeed Insights measures the performance of your website in terms of visual stability, page responsiveness, and loading times.
How to Read Your PageSpeed Insights Scores?
Interpreting your PageSpeed Insights scores is not much of a complicated thing. But before going to that section, allow me to point you to the quickest way to test your website speed on Google PageSpeed Insights.
To test the performance of your site, first, you need to copy the URL to your website. Then, from your browser, visit “pagespeed.web.dev” to run your test. In the dialogue box provided, paste the URL you have copied and then click on “Analyze” to see your scores.
After you have run your tests, you will be able to see your page speed scores and the strength of your core web vitals. Google classifies PageSpeed scores into three main categories, which I have arranged for your understanding in the following table.
| Core Web Vitals | Good | Needs Improvement | Poor |
| FCP | (0 – 1800) ms | (1800 – 3000) ms | Over 3000 ms |
| LCP | (0 – 2500) ms | (2500 – 4000) ms | Over 4000 ms |
| CLS | (0 – 0.1) | (0.1 – 0.25) | Over 0.25 |
| INP | (0 – 200) ms | (200 – 500) ms | Over 500ms |
| TTFB (experimental) | (0 – 800) ms | (800 – 1800) ms | Over 1800ms |
Essential Metrics to Focus on PageSpeed Insights Scores
As I have mentioned in this blog before, Core Web Vitals is the most crucial part of your scores on PageSpeed Insights. When reading your reports on PageSpeed Insights, you will come across metrics like FCP, LCP, CLS, and a few others. Now you must be wondering what the connection is between these elements and your website performance. Do they matter? Yes, certainly.
Core Web Vitals is a combination of metrics that Google uses to assess the performance of your website. These elements indicate how user-friendly your website is on the grounds of visual stability, page responsiveness, and loading speeds. As a website owner, you should know your core web vitals in detail.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
This metric is an integral part of the three pillars of Core Web Vitals. It measures the sudden change in the layout of your website when initial loading occurs. Google recommends keeping your CLS score between 0.1, which indicates a good-performing website that is visually stable. Anything beyond that value, you have to work on its improvement.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
Google defined INP as a metric that evaluates the responsiveness of your page. It refers to the total time taken by your website to respond whenever a user interacts with your page elements for the first time. Your website should respond to users within the first 200 milliseconds a user interacts. If your INP score goes beyond that, your page will suffer.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Google defined LCP as the total time taken before the largest content element of your page becomes visible to users. It is recommended that if the largest content element on your page becomes visible to users within the first 2500 milliseconds, your page is classified as a fast-loading website. However, if your LCP exceeds 2500 milliseconds, you must work to improve it.
How Does a Cache Plugin Work?
If you are new to website management, you probably do not know about caching. Caching is the simple process through which critical information about your website is downloaded into a browser’s memory for frequent use.
Now, here come cache plugins, which solely exist to improve the performance of your websites. But how do they do so? A typical cache plugin works by storing static versions of your web pages in your user’s browser. So, when a visitor to your site makes the next visit to that page, the browser displays the stored information from your website, which shortens the page loading process.
Using a cache plugin can not only reduce the page loading times. It also helps you to improve your user experience by making your site more responsive and engaging. Your website also gains traction, leading to increased conversions, which is the ultimate goal of building your website.
A cache plugin is also the key to boosting your SEO rankings. This is because a cache plugin does the technical tweaks that make your site agile. As Google stated, website speed is a crucial ranking factor for search engines. So, when you install a cache plugin on your site, it not only speeds up your website but also increases your online visibility, causing your website to appear higher on SERP results.
Ranking Some Powerful Cache Plugins
| Cache Plugin Name | Best Suited for | Pros | Cons | Pricing Plans |
| RabbitLoader | Overall performance and optimization | 1. Image Optimization 2. Lazy Loading 3. CDN Integration | 1. Some users have reported functionality issues. | The basic plan starts from $14.61 on a monthly basis. |
| WP Rocket | Beginner-friendly | 1. Excellent Compatibility 2. Cache-Preloading 3. Easy to Use | 1. No Free Plan | WP Rocket’s basic plans start from $59 a year. |
| W3 Total Cache | Multiple Caching Modes | 1. Browser Caching2. Object Caching3. Database Caching | 1. Complex interface | The starting plan of W3 Total Cache is priced at $99 a year. |
| Sucuri | Website Security | 1. Malware Removal 2. WAF Protection 3. Easy Setup | 1. Reliance on separate plugins for additional features | The basic plan starts from $229 a year. |
How You Can Truly Improve Your PageSpeed Insights Scores
By now, you should have minimum knowledge of Google PageSpeed Insights and how cache plugins can help you maximize your website’s performance. So, which cache plugin should you choose for your website?
Based on my rankings, I recommend using RabbitLoader for all your website needs. This is because RabbitLoader can act as a one-stop solution for optimizing your website’s performance. This cache plugin offers you advanced features like image optimization that compresses your website’s images to smaller file sizes. This directly impacts your LCP and speeds up page loading times.
Additionally, RabbitLoader also minifies larger Javascript, HTML and CSS files, which reduces the load on servers and makes your page more responsive than ever before. You are also able to improve your INP because RabbitLoader defers the loading of non-essential elements of your website during the initial loading, improving your CLS.
To round this up, RabbitLoader is a reliable cache plugin and optimization tool that is trusted by many clients from all around the world. You can read customer testimonials to see for yourself how RabbitLoader brought smiles to thousands of pro webmasters like you. Feel free to install this cache plugin, as it will take you through a simple and guided installation tour before unlocking the door to the maximum speed at PageSpeed Insights.
Message by Author
Hi, I’m Palash Ghosh, a Content Writer at Rabbitloader and a Guest Blogger. I specialize in crafting engaging blogs across diverse niches, including business, SaaS, marketing, and technical topics. I also publish content on reputable websites with dofollow links, helping businesses enhance their online presence.
Beyond writing, I enjoy reading novels, plays, and short stories, as well as listening to soft music.