[Resolved] What is more important? Performance grade or load time?

[Renske]

Hi there,

I’ve configured Autoptimize for my website. With Autoptimize on, I get a performance score of about 95 in Pingdom, but a load time of 2,5 s. With Autoptimize turned off, my performance score is 81 (B), but my load time significantly improves to about 1,5 s. So I’m wondering: which is more important? Performance score or load time? With PageSpeed Insights there’s no difference with Autoptimize turned on or off.

Is there a way to improve both load time and performance score?

Thanks! 🙂

[Elvin]

Hi Renske,

Performance score or load time?

It depends on the goal.

If you want your site to be on the first page Google search, weigh Google’s core web vitals score more heavily.

If you want better user experience, lean towards better page loading time.

Is there a way to improve both load time and performance score?

This usually should be the case. That’s actually the point of scoring performance. 🙂

But this requires multiple tests on different optimization settings to get the best result possible.

Usually, users settle with just the optimization plugins’s basic things like CSS and JS minification, aggregation and caching.

You can squeeze more performance out of optimization plugin’s features if it has CDN, page caching and object caching. (these features improve the loading time significantly)

But these settings require technical know-hows as these features may sometimes mess with how your site serves the contents, especially if they’re dynamic.

[Renske]

Thanks for your tips Elvin, I’ll check them out 🙂 Ofcourse I want both my performance and loading time to be as good as possible, but I don’t want to break my site 😉

[Elvin]

Thanks for your tips Elvin, I’ll check them out 🙂 Ofcourse I want both my performance and loading time to be as good as possible, but I don’t want to break my site

I recommend researching about Page caching and Object caching. It’s pretty tricky at first, but once you’ve understand their caveats, its usage should boost the performance of the site further.

No problem. Let us know if you need further help. 😀

[Author]

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