My Failed Attempt to Add Google Pagespeed Insights

by Juliet Rich

Google Pagespeed Insights is a WordPress plugin that was supposed to tell me about the load times on my pages and give me “insights” into how to speed things up.

Well, after fiddling around with it for 45 minutes or so, I finally hit a brick wall.

To save others the pain, I thought I should write it up!

* Install Google Pagespeed Insights plugin – check! Easy, fast, no problem.

* Give it a Google API key. Stumbling block.

* Go to Google Cloud Console. Attempt to get an API key. Be unclear as to which API key you’re supposed to be using — server or browser. Try first one API key, then the other. Wonder what all this talk of ‘billing’ is and if you’ve somehow signed up to get billed for things, even though Google doesn’t have your credit card info (or does it?). Figure out you have to turn Pagespeed ‘on’. Turn it on. Try again. Fail.

* Find detailed instructions for finding the API key. Try to follow them. Fail, because Cloud Console is different now and there’s no such thing as ‘Simple API key’. Try to find new instructions that say ‘browser’ or ‘server’. […]

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Mistake Made, Lesson Learned – Set a Site Description!

by Juliet Rich

As you may know, this site is running on WordPress. I had installed a plugin that was new to me, All in One SEO, which is supposed to help your search engine ranking. It does a lot of stuff automatically, but also gives you fine-tuned control over things like keywords.

My site shows up in Google now if you search for “juliet rich” — not that a lot of people are doing that just yet! — however, it was showing for a description the first sentence of my most recent post. Well, that’s not terribly helpful! It talks about Amazon Prime, which is only tangentially relevant to the site as a whole.

So I just went into the All in One SEO settings and set a site description. It’s a variation on my ‘About’ text.

I hope that will show searchers something a little more succinct and relevant to them than the start-of-a-post ramblings that they’ll see now.

So those of you with sites, I have made the mistake and learned the lesson for you as well as myself.

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