James McNulty

When you visit a web page, your browser requests all of the resources it needs to build it. Often a page will end up loading resources, such as JavaScript and CSS, containing code that isn’t actually needed to build the page in question; as a result, page load speed increases needlessly.

Most code is processed and loaded in the browser through what is known as the main thread. Think of it as a single-lane, one-way road. Each resource is a single car driving down that road, all of which have to arrive at their destination — the browser — for the page to finish loading. The more code you are trying to process, the longer it will take to finish loading the page. JavaScript and CSS typically take the most time to parse, compile and execute. Additionally, user interactions also run on that main thread. This means that the longer that JavaScript or CSS take to execute, the longer the page remains unresponsive to user interactions, leading to a less-than-satisfactory user experience.

With Page Experience (notably Core Web Vitals, for the purposes of this discussion) being taken into account by Google’s algorithms for ranking, it is important to make sure that you are doing everything you can to provide a good user experience, including reducing page load times and other page experience metrics such as Time to Interactive.

This guide will show how to quickly identify unused code in JavaScript and CSS resources so that you can take action, only load what is necessary, and improve your page load speeds.

In September we wrote about how title tags are measured in Google search results. We also released an accompanying title tag testing tool based on our findings.

We received wonderful feedback from the community, and even a couple of requests for a meta description length testing tool — so we made one!

Page titles are a fundamental aspect of search engine optimization. A page title not only helps to increase the prominence of your pages for target keywords in search results, but a well-written one can help earn the click over a competitor’s page.

The challenge in page title optimization is finding the right balance between the keywords you want to target, the message you want to convey, and the limitations on the overall page title length. Google will truncate your page title if it is too long – and that limitation is what marketers have tried to pinpoint for as long as that’s been the case.