PageSpeed Insights scores
Faster images increase your PageSpeed Insights performance score, which improves SEO. According to the Web Almanac the median home page weight in 2025 was more than 2.6MB, of which more than 50% is from images. To help you improve and track your PageSpeed Insights performance score, Pixy connects to Google’s servers periodically to test your website. The performance score is then displayed in the Pixy dashboard automatically.
What Pixy improves
When Pixy is enabled on your WordPress website, it automatically takes care of the following important factors which directly affect the PageSpeed Insights score:
- Use Next-Gen formats (AVIF and WebP)
- Compress images
- Improve TTFB for LCP image (When Speed Mode in toggled ON)
- Lazy Load images with LQIP placeholders
- Automatic LCP optimization with preload (Pro)
- Content Layout Shift (CLS) control (Pro)
- Critical Mobile Optimization (Pro)
What Pixy does not control
Apart from images, other factors also have effect on a website’s PageSpeed score, and may negatively impact it unless properly optimized. These are beyond the scope of Pixy:
- Page Caching
- Proper website structure (Eliminate Render-Blocking resources)
- Delay and Defer javascript
- Theme or plugin bloat
- TTFB of the website itself (Slow hosting server)
How to test correctly
When you activate Pixy it will rewrite the image links on your website, but it will not change the image extensions (eg. .png remains .png). Pixy will use the correct next-gen format automatically, and even if the image link is .png, it will send .avif to the browser. Here is how to test if Pixy is working properly:
- Clear the page cache of any page caching plugin or proxy (like Cloudflare)
- Deactivate any other image optimization plugins to avoid conflicts, errors or a broken website
- Run tests multiple times to warm page and image caching up.
- Look for any Next-Gen format warnings: If Pixy works correctly on your website, these will be gone from the PageSpeed Insights warnings
Interpreting the results
PageSpeed tests may return variable results, and your scores may differ by a few points after each test. This is normal and is how Google PageSpeed Insights works. If Pixy does not improve your results meaningfully after activation, check what other warnings are shown by PageSpeed Insights. For example, if a page takes 5 seconds to be sent to the visitor’s browser, all images will need to wait for 5 seconds until its their turn to be loaded, even if they take 0.1 second themselves.