WordPress PageSpeed Insights and Technical SEO Optimization: A Case Study

This project ran from May 4 to May 20, 2020. The goal was to improve speed, optimize the source code and fix technical SEO for the website nicolebridal.vn.

Before optimization

NicoleBridal.vn was built in 2017. The design looks minimal, but under the hood it used many “heavy” plugins such as WPBakery Page Builder, Smart Slider and WooCommerce.

• The mobile PSI score was only 3/100, with no positive metrics
• The desktop PSI score was also very low, with no positive metrics
• The GTMetrix score was very low too, showing the site had not been optimized at all
• An on-page SEO check also found a large number of errors

Assessment and optimization plan

The website was not built to a high standard and had no speed or code optimization. It also lacked plugins needed for day-to-day operation, such as automatic redirects for broken posts and image compression.

The plan was to use quality plugins to optimize the site, such as:

• WP Rocket (file compression, caching, lazy-load…)
• Smush Pro (compresses images as soon as they are uploaded)

We reviewed how each plugin loads its resources and turned off resources that were not in use (for example Google Fonts, and some JS files loaded by default even though they were not used).

We used Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Website Auditor to check SEO standards and rebuilt the heading structure. We fixed 404 errors, missing titles and missing meta descriptions, and removed broken links, so the site met on-page SEO standards.

Results after optimization

After 2 weeks, the website’s scores had improved significantly:

• PSI scores on both mobile and desktop reached positive results
• The GTMetrix score was very high: 98/100
• Page load time dropped from 17.1 seconds to 6.7 seconds
• The number of SEO errors fell significantly
• Duplicate H1 errors were eliminated from the site

In just 2 weeks, the page load quality and SEO of nicolebridal.vn were completely transformed.