My PageSpeed Score Journey
TL;DR – Faster pages make everyone happy
This is my journey of how I achieved a perfect PageSpeed score.
Firstly, besides writing here on Dividend Derek, I created and run Custom Stock Alerts (CSA). Being in the IT field, it’s important to continue working on my skill set. CSA was the perfect project for me to try out some new technologies. It’s hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and I use a multitude of their services. I honestly can’t speak highly enough of my experience setting everything up and the documentation available when I needed help (which is still often).
After launching CSA, I started researching how to make my site more visible, how to appear better on Google for SEO, things of that nature like any small business would. I came across PageSpeed Insights and ran my initial test. It wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t great, I think my initial PageSpeed score was in the 60s.
A high PageSpeed score is important for a few reasons, users won’t wait around on a poor performing site and Google understands this. They won’t say just how much, but it appears to play a role in how high you rank on organic searches. Also, to reiterate, being in IT it was something I also wanted to do to learn new things.
Initial Setup
The first trick was getting mod_pagespeed installed on my web server. In a nutshell, the mod will do things like inline CSS, javascript, minify files, a lot of web tweaks plus a multitude of other things. The mod is compatible with Apache and Nginx, I personally have Apache setup. Once I had it installed and confirmed it was working. Reran the test and my PageSpeed score only jumped to about 70. Not the complete slam dunk I was hoping for.

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