Leverage Browser Caching

D

Hi,

I just ran PageSpeed Insights on my landing page and Google recommends adding browser caching for our images to speed up load times. I can’t find anything about how to do this in unBounce. Guidance appreciated.

16 replies

Johnny_Opao
Userlevel 3

Hey Debbie

When it comes to using Google’s ‘PageSpeed Insights’ it’s best not to use that number as a metric of how fast your page is actually loading for visitors. Here’s a great article that goes into detail about this topic:

http://blog.catchpoint.com/2011/12/27…

PageSpeed Insights is used as a tool to find tweaks you can make to improve the pages speed and not a actual measure of how fast the page actually loads. You can look at the score as Google saying ‘maybe try this! it could boost the performance of your page’. But should not be seen as anything more than a suggestion.

As for minifying default Unbounce code on the page, this is not possible from the customer front. That said, despite those files not being minified your pages should load at respectable speeds.

Do you have your pages integrated with Google Analytics? If you do and you’d like to observe the ‘average page load time’ for your actual visitors there is a section to do so under your ‘Behaviour’ reports.

For more info on understanding these reports checkout the article below
https://support.google.com/analytics/…

A

Does having a low “PageSpeedInsights” negatively impact the “Landing Page Experience” component of the Google Adwords Quality Score? I ask because, I am trying to determine why I have a below average “Landing Page Experience” score of 4/10 for my PPC AdWords Campaign, since for a human, I think my site has a nice experience and I tried to follow many of the guidelines which Unbounce provided.

From PageSpeed Insights I am also getting a message to “Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content” as  “Your page has 13 blocking script resources and 5 blocking CSS resources. This causes a delay in rendering your page.”  I am not sure if or how I should act on this. What should I do?  Thanks in advance for your help. 

My page is www.customdogcrate.com.  Thanks. 

K

hi, I have the same problem. My keywords in Adwords have low quality score due to below average landing page experience. I’ve been told by adwords support that it is due to issues with speed on my site and that I should chcek site speed insights and improve the following:

  • Your page has 8 blocking script resources and 3 blocking CSS resources. This causes a delay in rendering your page.
  • Setting an expiry date or a maximum age in the HTTP headers for static resources instructs the browser to load previously downloaded resources from local disk rather than over the network.

How can I do this in Unbounce?

G

I’m having the same issue.  It is worse on the Mobile than on Desktop, but both are pretty bad.

Is there some reason Unbounce wouldn’t do most of these things just as a general practice?

I guess I don’t see a downside to just adding a minification and compression process as part of the publishing of a page.

I’m not sure I understand why ALL pages wouldn’t do this by default, but even adding as an option should be fairly straightfoward from a technical standpoint.

As above, I’m having problems with AdWords Quality Scores, which (while they may not reflect actual speed) certainly seem to come into play in the QS calculation.

I assume this is one of those things that Google implements and then the rest of the industry has to figure out how to adapt to…

Carter
Rank

Hey all,
Thanks for the feedback Ñ page performance is definitely something we are interested in improving, and we’ve got this on our roadmap. Having specific examples of QS being hurt by your page loading speed helps us prioritize.

Almost exactly a year ago we launched a major overhaul to our Page Serving platform which you can read about here if you’re curious: http://inside.unbounce.com/product-dev/new-page-serving-platform/

With that launch we started serving pages up from multiple data centres around the world (depending on what location is closest to your visitor.) This had huge improvements on “initial” page load speed, but still left lots to do with regards to overall page load times. Serving images over a CDN was also a part of that, but we know there are still lots of opportunities for optimization.

We’ll be making iterative improvements to the load times as we go, so hopefully those will be reflected in your QS over time too.

Cheers,
Carter

Aleks

Hi Carter

I use AdWords to drive traffic from the Google Display Network (GDN) to an Unbounce landinpage. The landingpage load speed is officially a part of the AdWords quality score factor. Unfortunately AdWords does not give us insights on how high or low the quality score for a particular landingpage is. A bad quality score will increase CPC’s and lower the impression share.

I believe Pagespeed Insights is a quite accurate reading for what Google is considering a good or bad page speed, especially because Google Analytics also incorporates Pagespeed Insights measurements for its pagespeed suggestions.

As I said, Google uses the page load speed as a part of the quality score factor. Although Google AdWords does not officially state that Google Pagespeed Insights is being used for the quality score I think we can be quite sure that this or something similar IS being used to calculate the speed quality score. 

So doing everything to improve the Google Pagespeed Insights scores should be made a priority.

Cheers
Aleks

dfgross81

Ahmen. I starting running unbounce LPs a few days ago and I am already noticing a drop in QS related to LP performance. Big issue.

Phillip

QS doesn’t measure LP speed. It measures if people like your landing page. They do this by measuring how many people quickly bounce back to the search engine after viewing your page.

Improve your page content and you should improve your QS. But honestly, that’s only a small factor in QS. The more important compenent is Click Through Rate.

S

Phillip - while it’s debatable whether QS measures LP speed or not, there’s no question that LP speed will affect conversion rates. Browser caching is definitely a problem. e.g. I have a 5-step landing page (i.e. 5 sequenced pages) and the page background, company logo, etc appear to reload on each step. I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, but the browser should definitely load all common elements instantly from cache, from the 2nd step onward, right?

S

Carter - could you help us understand why exactly browser caching is disabled on Unbounce?

Aleks

addendum:

it is debatable how much the pageload speed factors into the QS for AdWords Search Ads. Nothing official there.

For AdWords Display Ads pageload speed is definitively a major factor which is why pageload speed needs to be a priority. 

Joe

Excellent explanation, Johnny!

Md_Ashraf_Malik

copy and paste this code in your .htaccess file 

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
ExpiresDefault “access 2 days”

or visit how to leverage browser caching

J

@Carter you mentioned 11 months ago you were working on improvements. It seems people are still seeing poor QS.  I am a bit frustrated as well because the one problem we have had is landing page experience.  Any new developments?

K

Hey Carter, 

Any developments on this issue?
I’m interested in learning if there is a solution or a workaround, since I’m experiencing the same problems as some of the others in this thread. Thanks.

I

Hi, could you please tell me where do I find this “.htaccess file” in unbounce?
I also found that page you shared, but without knowing where the file is, I can’t put the code.

It would be awesome if you / someone could help me 😊
Thank you in advance!

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