Sorry for not posting last weekend, I was busy working behind the scenes to improve the Harvey Mercheum website. It is no secret that I am a big fan of Google and their various offerings, such as Google Calendar, which I used to create the Harvey Mercheum editorial calendar. I have been running Google’s PageSpeed Insights and trying to act upon its suggestions. But for a web browser, I use Firefox, and have for years. I recently found out about Lighthouse, and wanted to give it a try, so I installed Google Chrome on my new desktop computer and used it to run the Lighthouse audit. It gave me more suggestions, some of which I was able to act upon.

According to my weekly GTmetrix report, my PageSpeed score went from 86% to 87%, my YSlow score from 65% to 67%, fully loaded time from 5.8 seconds to 4.5 seconds, total size from 1.95MB to 1.48MB, and requests from 82 to 78. Not huge improvements, but every little bit counts. Starting in July, Google is supposed to start using speed as a ranking factor, at least for mobile devices, so I am trying to do what I can. I have done a few more things since that last summary report, I will post the results when they are available.

UPDATE: This week’s report shows PageSpeed of 88% and YSlow of 69%, with the other scores unchanged.