It has been more than a year since Google drastically changed how they measure page speed. Since then, it's been our top priority to optimize every site we power with unparalleled load times that are far ahead of industry leaders.
This means a promise of a score of 90 or higher on PageSpeed Insights. Full stop.
Page Speed Villains
To understand how we do this, let's first identify the biggest enemies of page speed. These are the pain points that huge publishers haven't been able to solve:
- Rich Content: Long listicles and elaborate content experiences that aren't well executed often slow down load time.
- Ads: As a user of the web, you know exactly how frustrating it can be to visit a website completely overloaded with ads. Both native and programmatic ads can bog down a site. Third-party ad services like Outbrain and Taboola can also reduce a PageSpeed score, including digital ad analytics software like Moat. Video ads like AnyClip and DistroScale can also overtake a site's user experience.
- Content Embeds: All video embeds, including YouTube, JW Player, and Facebook, can impact your site's performance. Third-party content from Twitter and Instagram is also a page speed killer.
At RebelMouse, the sites in our network still use all of the aforementioned page speed offenders. The difference is that we've figured out a way to optimize load time so our sites still receive a 90+ score on PageSpeed Insights.
RebelMouse's Page Speed Performance Upgrades
- Clutter-Free Code: Our core engineering team works tirelessly to optimize third-party APIs. This means our JavaScript app handles each site with minimal code and efficient thread management. We achieve the same functionality as major websites with a fraction of the code.
RebelMouse is dedicated to minimizing our code so our sites load with efficiency and speed.
- Smarter Monetization: Many of the sites on the web will spend up to $10 million or more a year on a team of developers who support a heavy tech infrastructure. Usually, these expensive developers will say that they can't deliver a site with a PageSpeed score in the 90s that has ads or marketing/analytics APIs. By contrast, we're proudly delivering high PageSpeed scores for sites fully loaded with ads. We do this through smart, next-generation management of load sequencing.
- Endless Improvements: Every time we make a breakthrough in page speed, the upgrade is applied to all of our clients. RebelMouse is a truly iterative platform where everyone receives the benefits of staying modern without installing new updates or plugins that can easily result in broken site functionality.
- Optimized for Social: Our platform is optimized for Instagram and Twitter so their third-party APIs won't impact page speed. This is usually a top penalty for major publishers.
Check out some of our highest PageSpeed scores in 2020:
How We Create Lightning-Fast Sites
Let's take a look under the hood of how we've mastered site speed without sacrificing dynamic media or ad space. Here's a look at our page speed upgrades using RebelMouse-powered Brit + Co as an example.
Sticky programmatic ads with high visibility upon load:
In-content ads that load dynamically:
AnyClip video player usage:
Outbrain integration intact:
Plenty of media elements in every post:
See the Difference
You can easily see the impact that our page speed upgrades have on PageSpeed scores. Here's a comparison of two articles that both feature multiple YouTube videos.
This article from RebelMouse-powered It's a Southern Thing has a PageSpeed score of 97 on mobile and has been optimized for speed by our developers.
Some articles from TrueSelf also have YouTube videos, yet have not been optimized by our developers using our page speed upgrades, causing a mobile score of 20.
Optimize Your Site for Maximum Performance
Poor performance can dramatically hurt your search ranking, your ability to monetize, and your ability to retain loyal readers. In this decade, quality content is not enough to sustain growth — it has to be supported by modern technology as well.
If you want to take advantage of our 2020 page speed promise and start experiencing PageSpeed scores in the 90s or higher, request a proposal today and let's start working together.
