Understanding Suggested Improvements in Performance

Summary

Suggested Improvements are the recommendations generated in Performance as part of the page measurements carried out. These are meant to effectively guide your work in improving your pages speed, experience, and performance, and are a vital part of working effectively when trying to optimize your website's pages.

What are Suggested Improvements in Performance?

Suggested Improvements are the recommendations generated in Performance as part of the page measurements carried out. These are meant to effectively guide your work in improving your pages speed, experience, and performance, and are a vital part of working effectively when trying to optimize your website's pages.

Examples of suggested improvements that are generated when measuring a page include “Size images to fit screen” and “Remove unused JavaScript”. In both of these examples, these recommendations show up as a result of the measurement finding a page that is encumbered by images larger than the device screen being measured with, and unnecessary JavaScript on the page dragging down the performance.

Suggested improvements will always be contextual and specific to your pages content, construction, and setup, and will vary from page-to-page and site-to-site.

What are the new updates to the Suggested Improvements?

Suggested Improvements have been updated in the following ways:

• Sorting of issue types
• More specific metrics
• Improved guidance

Where to find Suggested Improvements

You can find Suggested Improvements at the bottom of the Measurement Results page in Performance:

Improvements and Best Practices

Here you will see them sorted into two primary categories; Improvements and Best Practices.

• Improvements are areas or specific elements that you should optimize in order to gain a direct benefit in terms of load speed and performance. You’ll also find that they are prioritized according to which improvements will yield the greatest improvements in terms of load time (on average across profiles).
• Best practices are practices that you should include, if possible, on the page in order to ensure a high performing page over time. While it’s not always possible to put a specific time savings amount on these as with Improvements, it is still important in order to set yourself up for success when optimizing.

Suggested Improvement details

Selecting a specific Improvement or Best practice will take you to the Issue Page, shown below.

Here you will find a description of the issue, how to fix it, as well as the affected measurements. You will also find links, via the arrow buttons, to each specific measurement results for this improvement.

Clicking this arrow will take you to the practical recommendations for this specific improvement, based on that specific measurement.

How recommendations are prioritized

Once you have selected a specific measurement for which you’d like to view practical recommendations, you will see which areas need to be optimized.

You’ll also find that the resources are prioritized according to how great an impact they have on performance, and consequently how large the potential savings are.