How to Get GTmetrics Performance Score Grade A – 0ms TBT

In this post, you will learn how I scored a 99% GTmetrics performance score, 0ms TBT (Total Blocking Time), and Core Web Vitals Report for most website pages.

Everything I did and executed can be replicated by anyone, regardless of your marketing experience or WordPress knowledge.

I have tried several performance optimization methods that seem to work a little, but the tips I shared in this post will deliver significant improvements.

Before I walk you through the steps, here’s a brief description of the tool for those unfamiliar with GTmetrics.

What is GTmetrics?

GTmetrics is a website performance and page speed testing tool developed by Carbon360. It is one of the few tools, along with Pingdom, webpage test, and Web.dev, trusted and used by millions of marketers worldwide.

Initially, GTmetrics uses data from the Page Speed and YSlow libraries to perform in-depth analyses of website URL performance and page speed.

However, since the 2020 upgrade, Google Lighthouse (the industry standard for web performance) has powered GTmetrics to analyze your website’s page experience and speed index breakdown.

GTmetrics uses grades and scores. Also, it presents a description of what’s slowing down your website pages and possible optimization recommendations.

You can use GTmetrics to diagnose issues, pinpoint problems, and follow its recommendations to speed up your slow website.

GTmetrics checks your website performance and page speed across 67 servers in 22 locations worldwide.

To learn more about the new GTmetrics Google Lighthouse reports, read the official announcement on the blog.

How Reliable is the GTmetrics Score?

As with most page speed and website performance analytics tools that use the Google Lighthouse data, you should expect real-world page load observations.

The performance scores from most page speed and performance testing tools, as reported by Google Lighthouse, should be similar. However, you may see a slightly different performance test report in a particular scenario.

This is due to many factors, such as latency, network conditions, server location and browser. Performance scores and speed tests will vary from tool to tool due to differences in testing methodologies and configurations.

But you should rest assured that GTmetrics is nearly as accurate as the Google Page Speed Insight and Lighthouse data.

Now that you know GTmetrics, you must learn how these web pages perform before and after the performance optimization strategies.

Here are some of the GTmetrics performance scores before the optimization process…

Then, here are some of the after-optimization GTmetrics performance and Core Web Vitals scores…

As you can see, these are not flukes or coincidences.

These result from hard work, experiments, trials, errors, investments, and a winning on-page SEO strategy.

Now, let me walk you through the steps and strategies I followed to achieve optimal results.

How I Improve GTmetrics Score And Core Web Vitals Performance

I did only three things right to get the best GTmetrix score for this blog; in this post, you will read all three steps in detail.

1. Upgrading Hosting Plan

The first thing I did was upgrade this blog’s hosting plan.

In April 2020, I reported upgrading from Shared Hosting to Namecheap’s EasyWP-managed WordPress hosting.

If you haven’t read that post, now is an excellent time to read.

After upgrading to the starter plan on the EasyWP server back in 2020, the blog has improved on all website performance levels- speed and performance.

Since then, the blog has remained hosted on the EasyWP Starter plan.

Of course, everything was working smoothly until the blog traffic took a bit of a turn. During peak traffic times, the page loads slowly, and sometimes, the 5XX Cloudflare connection times out.

I was furious and wanted an improvement.

I began searching for the cause of this. So, I started testing and implementing whatever optimization methods I could think of.

After testing several website performance optimization strategies, nothing seemed to work, so I upgraded the server again.

At this point, I wasn’t sure or convinced that upgrading to a higher server plan would directly impact website performance and speed. I want to see if there are any performance differences between the server plans.

So, I bought the EasyWP Turbo plan and upgraded from the starter plan.

The Turbo plan has 1.5x the CPU and 1.5x the RAM. It comes with a free Supersonic CDN, a free SSL Certificate, a 200k monthly visit limit, 50GB of SSD storage and runs on the NGINX server.

After upgrading the server, the speed improved significantly. Also, the Cloudflare 5XX host is not working, and the error code has been resolved.

However, the Core Web Vitals assessment score remains unchanged or has improved.

So, I will continue to search for ways to improve the website’s performance.

Note: I didn’t switch to the Namecheap Supersonic CDN; I stuck with the Cloudflare CDN.

2. Remove WordPress Optimization Plugins

Before I upgrade to the Turbo plan, this blog has the following optimization plugins:

After upgrading to the Turbo plan, I expected an immediate or instant optimization experience. But that wasn’t the case.

So, I installed a few more WordPress-optimized plugins, such as Hummingbird. After installing and activating Hummingbird and running the first scan, the GTmetrics score went from Grade B to E.

And the performance scores were down to 42%. The Core Web Vitals score was below average on all levels except for Cumulative Layout Shift at 0.02

At this time, I guess the more optimization plugins I install, the less optimized the blog becomes.

So I decided to do something different.

Since the EasyWP Turbo plan is 1.5X more optimized than the Starter plan and comes with an in-built three-layer cache system, I decided to uninstall all WordPress optimization plugins on the blog – except for JetPack and JetPack Boost.

I uninstalled Autoptimize, WebCraftic Clearfy, Hummingbird, and BBQ – Block Bad Request (a firewall plugin).

I also uninstalled the official AMP plugin, causing compatibility issues for a long time.

I uninstalled AMP due to the compatibility issue with several other WordPress plugins – Stackable for one, and the blog’s current theme – Astra.

After uninstalling all these plugins, I cleared the WordPress cache and ran the web pages through GTmetrics again.

The result was amazing and unbelievable.

At first, I was unsure of the steps to produce the optimization results. I wanted to be sure of what worked and what did not.

I installed and activated all the plugins mentioned above on the blog and ran the exact web pages through GTmetrics again.

As expected, all results were below the average industry benchmark. On average, most pages score GTmetrics Grades of D, E, F, and, at best, C.

I uninstalled the plugins, cleared the cache, and reran the pages. The pages went from low GTmetrix performance scores to A, and the Core Web Vitals scores improved across all metrics.

At this point, I was sure of one thing – the more optimization plugins I installed, the less optimized the blog.

Don’t judge yet; I’ll tell you what happens quickly. Continue reading.

3. Optimize WordPress Images

I deactivated the JetPack Site Accelerator service when Hummingbird was installed on this blog.

Hummingbird was the image optimization WordPress plugin since it was installed. But after the revelation, the deactivation, and the uninstallation of Hummingbird and other optimization plugins, I switched to the JetPack Site Accelerator.

Now, the images on this blog are optimized and compressed by the JetPack Site Accelerator and served from its global CDN.

4. Activating Jetpack Boost

Another optimization feature added was JetPack Boost.

JetPack Boost is an optimization plugin from the same team that gave you WordPress and JetPack.

The free performance optimization plugin allows you to combine and optimize CSS delivery and defer non-essential JavaScript files without touching a line of code.

JetPack Boost is a one-click install and optimization plugin. You don’t have to configure or walk through complex settings to get the plugin to work.

Install and activate the plugin, and it will go to work.

The plugin also comes with the image lazy-load feature. This helps delay the image display until the user scrolls to the viewpoint.

JetPack Boost can also help improve the Core Web Vitals report from Google.

The plugin optimizes how content and files are delivered from your web host to users’ browsers.

For example, the CSS optimization feature will move critical page styling to the top, so it loads before the rest of the page content.

This enables the user’s browser to load critical content faster, so it doesn’t have to wait for all the page’s content to load.

As a result of these optimization changes, the web page will experience faster content delivery, improved page speed, and the Core Web Vitals metrics.

How to Improve GTmetrics Performance Score: Take-Away

If you read this content carefully, you will notice that minimal financial investment was spent here.

Aside from the web hosting package upgrade, all other tools mentioned here are free.

The JetPack image optimization feature comes with your free JetPack plugin. Also, the JetPack Boost is a free plugin from Automatic.

Another thing to note here is that JetPack and JetPack Boost are two separate plugins, and you don’t need to install JetPack to use JetPack Boost.

Both plugins work separately. None is dependent on the other.

Now, to an essential message you need to get here:

Hummingbird, Autoptimize, and WebCraftic Clearfy are excellent and powerful WordPress optimization plugins.

I will assume these plugins are unnecessary or needed in the EasyWP Turbo hosting environment. This is because the Turbo plan is optimized to provide better performance and speed and to pass the Google Core Web Vitals assessment.

From my experience, you don’t need any other caching plugin with EasyWP-managed WordPress hosting.

So, if you host with Namecheap, try the Turbo plan and see if you get the same or better GTMetrics performance score as I did.