Improving Google Page Speed Insights

A trend of increasing traffic to my site from mobile

This site has never been optimised for mobile. There hasn’t been a need. However, 15% of traffic is now from mobile devices, compared with just 2% in 2016.

Using the fantastic Google PageSpeed Insights, it can be seen where the site has potential for improvement. A score of 48 out of 100 is just awful for mobile.

Even on desktop, there is an opportunity to improve from a score of 93.

Why I decided to remove Disqus comments system from my site?

I have been using Disqus on this site since 2015. It is a great tool to add comments capability to a static site, such as this. Analysing the potential opportunities, it can be seen that Disqus is the worst offender at impacting load performance.

There are options to potentially improve the performance whilst keeping Disqus. This site shows how use lazy-loading of the Disqus scripts: How to Prevent Disqus Comments System from Slowing Page Speed & Performance.

I have had some good feedback through Disqus from users of this site, but I don’t want to change the default Disqus script behaviour and I definitely don’t want to compromose the user experience from mobile devices.

What Improvement Was Achieved by Removing Disqus from the Static Site?

As you can see, after removing the Disqus comments script from the site, the mobile performance is now 95 out of 100. That’s an improvement of almost 50!

Crucially, the Disqus script is no longer impacting page load performance.

And amazingly, the desktop performance is now at 100!

I will investigate other static site comment systems in a later blog post, for example staticman, but for now, job done.