PageSpeed Score 100
I have a very strong feeling you have never seen a Google LightHouse Audit result with a dark theme colour with neon green text and fireworks.
The perfect 100/100 Lighthouse screenshot above was taken in April 2020 for this websites HomePage, want to test it for yourself, click the live text button below.
PageSpeed scores do vary based on a lot of factors including where you are connecting from. The SEO Gold website is currently running on a cheap Godaddy VPS server located in Europe (Netherlands). The further you are away from the Netherlands less likely you’ll see the elusive 100/100 across the board perfect Lighthouse results.
I test from my home office in Skegness which is around 300 miles (as the crow flies) from the Netherlands and get good consistently high LightHouse scores for my HomePage.
If you don’t see 100/100 the first time, but it’s close (99/100, 98/100) try Refreshing the PageSpeed test page, you should see the full 100 PageSpeed score eventually.
If you live in say Australia or have a really slow Internet connection hitting the PageSpeed score 100 is less likely. If you run the test feel free to post a comment below of where you tested from and the Performance score.
How to Score PageSpeed 100?
To achieve the elusive PageSpeed 100 score took a LOT of SEO effort, EVERYTHING on the website from WordPress theme to WordPress plugins have to be SEO performance friendly: most WordPress themes and plugins are far from performance friendly.
For example, because WordPress runs an old version of jQuery, if you run any WordPress theme or plugin feature which uses jQuery your Best Practices score drops by 15 points!
So even if everything else is 100% perfect the Best Practices score drops to 85/100 and you won’t see the PageSpeed Score 100 fireworks due to a “Includes front-end JavaScript libraries with known security vulnerabilities” issue.
The SEO Gold About page for example includes a contact form built with a WordPress contact form plugin which uses jQuery, see the test below:
While running a feature which uses jQuery the best possible LightHouse results are:
Performance: 100/100
Accessibility: 100/100
Best Practices: 85/100
SEO: 100/100
It’s why I only have jQuery on one webpage on this entire site, if you want perfection you can’t install plugins etc… for unnecessarily flashy features.
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