98/100 Core Web Vitals score

98/100 PageSpeed Insights score in less than 15 minutes with Staq's game changer feature.

Staq is on a mission to deliver the fastest possible website load times for WordPress!

Back in September 2021, Staq released its proprietary caching and optimizer tool for Google's Core Web Vital signals.

On 5 March 2022, Staq raised the bar and released it's game changer feature which is to serve the entire website from AWS CloudFront. We call this Staq Next-Gen CDN. It works complimentary with our caching and optimizer tool.

Essentially, Staq Next-Gen CDN is a proxy CDN service that caches the entire website on AWS CloudFront. It also requires to reroute the DNS to CloudFront and away from the server but it is intelligent enough to redirect traffic back to the origin server, if required. That means you can even run WooCommerce sites too!

How it works

By enabling Staq Next-Gen CDN (1-click only and takes up to 5 minutes to deploy), Staq automatically changes your A record and changes it to an alias record that connects to an AWS CloudFront certificate.

When you do a DNS lookup of the domain, 4x A records appear which are all CloudFront. Once cached in a local AWS CDN zone, the website is then loaded from the AWS zone whether that is Sydney, Melbourne, London to California. That means no connection is made to the local server.

Back to how we scored 98/100 for mobile

Using both Staq caching, optimizer and Next-Gen CDN, we were able to receive a PageSpeed Insights score of 98/100 for mobile in less than 15 minutes!

To break it down, it took:

5 minutes optimizing the website using Staq cache and optimizer

2.5 minutes of checking the site

1 click to deploy Staq Next-Gen CDN but 5 minutes to deploy in the background

A further 2.5 minutes of checking the site.

Results

Below is a summary of the results:

Type	No Cache	Staq Cache	Staq Cache + Staq Next-Gen CDN	Result
First Contentful Paint	2.0 seconds	1.8 seconds	1.5 seconds	25% overall improvement
Speed Index	7.6 seconds	1.8 seconds	1.5 seconds	80.26% overall improvement
Largest Contentful Paint	3.6 seconds	3.0 seconds	2.0 seconds	44.44% overall improvement
Time to Interactive	7.7 seconds	1.8 seconds	1.5 seconds	80.52% overall improvement
Total Blocking Time	90 milliseconds	0 milliseconds	0 milliseconds
Cumulative Layout Shift	0.017	0.02	0
Google PageSpeed Insights Score	76 / 100	93 / 100	98 / 100	28.95% overall improvement

The details

The Staq website uses a page builder called Beaver Builder. Page builders have a reputation of being bloated and achieving poor PageSpeed Insight scores. However, this can be easily overcome by using both Staq cache and optimizer together with Staq Next-Gen CDN.

Before you see the power of the Staq Next-Gen CDN, below are screenshots of what the Staq website was achieving before.

No Cache - results

With absolutely no cache whatsoever applied to the website (using raw server power), the website achieve a PageSpeed Insights score of 76/100:

According to Pingdom Tools, the website loaded in 2.71 seconds from Sydney

The website then took 4.71 seconds to load in San Fransisco, USA:

When assessing time to first byte (TTFB) across different cities across the globe, the site achieved the following results:

Methods used in Staq Cache - results

This is where the magic happens. In around 5 minutes, I achieve amazing PageSpeed Insights scores.

After turning on Staq cache and optimizer, I then applied the following Core Web Vital optimization features:

Minified and combined JS tags and files

All I had done was enabled:

Minify JavaScript tags

Minify JavaScript files

Combine all JavaScript

Then, I used an aggressive process of delaying the execution of the combined JavaScript files but excluded anything to do with lazyload or Calendly as I wanted those JS files to load upon initial load. The other JS files load based on user interaction:

CSS Optimization

The website did not have any render blocking issues but had minimal cumulative layout shift but not enough to consider optimization. I did, however, remove Google Fonts:

Lazyload, WebP and other optimization

I then proceeded to optimize anything to do with media by enabling:

Staq lazyload feature

Add image dimensions

serve images in WebP format (since we rewrite the HTML file, the cached file will contain the WebP link but also include the legacy fallback link just in case the user's browser does not support WebP)

Preload an image

General optimization including DOM Reducer

I then applied the following settings in the screen, including our HTML Optimizer which reduces the DOM size of the page:

The Results with Staq cache AND Staq Next-Gen CDN - results

Once enabled, both speed and score results improved to achieve 98/100 for mobile. If you use the PageSpeed Insights tool on your browser, the website achieves 100/100 for desktop.

Once cached in Sydney, the site loaded in 378 milliseconds:

Not only is the website optimized within the same region as the origin server (in this case the site is hosted in Sydney, Australia), it is also fast around the world.

Once cached in San Francisco, it loaded in 395 milliseconds:

Once cached in London, it loaded in 427 milliseconds:

Globally, the TTFB score loads super fast, once cached in that region:

SEO Results

Since the wpstaq.com website is new, we are seeing our organic traffic increase, especially after including different countries in our hreflang setup which tells Google which countries we want to be indexed in.

Jono, from EcomXSEO, who was one of our beta uses of Staq Next-Gen CDN deployed a site on 7 March 2022. Since then, he has noticed a significant increase in organic website traffic to the website. This is the graph Jono had supplied to us on 22 March 2022: