Page speed is an important factor in ranking on Google because it’s important for your website’s user experience. If things load slow, that’s the quickest way to drive users away from your website and toward your competition. This means knowing how to improve page load speeds and knowing what page speed optimization is, is key to a successful SEO strategy. Your page speed is the amount of time it takes load an entire page on a website. If your page loads too slowly, Google will penalize your site and your search engine rankings will bump down. How fast is an average page load speed? For reference, if your site loads in 5 seconds, it is faster than approximately 25% of the web. If your site loads in 2.9 seconds, it is faster than approximately 50% of the web. Keep reading to learn how to improve your page load speed. If you have any questions about your SEO strategy, reach out to us at Prebuilt Sites or The BBS Agency. We’d love to help you out!
Page speed is about user experience. If things load slow, your users will easily click away from your website and visit your competition. Also, the slower your page loads, Google will notice and penalise you in rankings.
You need to know how to improve page load speeds, need to know what page speed optimisation is, and why it is so key to your overall SEO campaign. Read on and let us inform you of these things and more.
Moz states that:
“page speed can be described in either “page load time”, (the time it takes to fully display the content on a specific page) or “time to first byte” (how long it takes for your browser to receive the first byte of information from the webserver).”
https://moz.com/learn/seo/page-speed
The time it takes to load an entire page is generally the metric used to determine load speed. This is all influenced by your server speed, your internet connection, file sizes, and image compression, to name but a few.
To check your page speed and find out if there is something wrong or not, we have three tools we’d recommend using.
The GTMetrix Speed Tool is powered by Google Lighthouse, an open-source automated tool you can use to improve the performance of your website.
To get a full result and report from these guys you do need to pay, but you can get yourself a good idea of your page speed from the free services they provide.
One of the best features of GTMetrix is the waterfall. This shows the load order and load speed of each element on your website. Web Developers love this feature as it gets into the nitty-gritty of what bits are loading faster than others and in which order they are loading.
There seem to be very few downsides to using GTMetrix, and the ones found by reviewers online are kind of small.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
This site is very comprehensive when it comes to details about your page speed. It is, however, a very hard judge on sites. Your score on the Google Page Speed may be lower than on other sites.
With Google’s Core Web Vitals coming out, page speed has suddenly become very important, so sites like Google’s Page Speed are also important. It slips right in next to the Core Web Vitals in regards to helping you rank high with SERP.
Much like GTMetrix, there are few CONS to using the Google Page Speed tool. Feedback includes, suggestions for fixing the issues can be full of technical jargon and complicated for the common web user. Also, some of the performance requirements suggested can be almost impossible to meet.
https://www.semrush.com/siteaudit/
Semrush has a vast array of tools to help make your website awesome, including their Site Audit tool to help with your Page Speed.
It presents data in graphs and charts and is very easy to read. The report can give you a diagnosis of any problems it finds.
While it gives you a lot of great information and presented very well, again it may take a bit of technical knowledge to fix any identified issues. There is a large knowledge database you can read, but still, it can be intimidating to the casual web user.
Page speed, as an element of SEO, has been a factor since 2010. Google upped the ante in 2018 with their SPEED update which included mobile factors in their scores.
Google ranks pages higher with a better and faster loading time. This makes it a direct ranking factor for SERP. Google measures this speed in time to the first byte.
Crawlers can crawl more pages on a site if it loads faster. This convenience to crawl and get data quicker helps lift you up the ranking.
User Experience is a factor with page speed. If a user gets annoyed at a slow loading page, they will click away and visit your competition. This bounce rate impacts negatively upon your ranking with Google.
Now that you’ve used one of the tools and found out your page is loading a little slowly, and you understand the importance of page speed, how do you increase it?
With mobile browsing always on the increase, and it being a big part of Google’s speed update, having a fast page load for mobile users is important and smart.
Core Web Vitals is a massive update to Google happening this year, 2021. There is a lot out there online regarding the ins and outs of this, but in a nutshell, there are 3 core vitals Google is focussing on in this update to help with ranking. They are:
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
This is a bad User Experience. To fix these issues, do the following:
This is how quickly a person can interact with your page, such as:
This factor is important because it reflects how real people use your website. For a page that is mostly passive content, FID is not that important. IF you have surveys, subscription forms, or the like, then this factor is very important.
How to fix this problem?
How long does it take for your page to load from a user’s point of view? This element is directly linked to Page Speed and what we’ve been talking about.
This metric is different from other speed metrics because it is USER CENTRIC, and how a user is able to see and interact with a page.
If you find any of these issues with your website, some ways to fix them include:
Search intent is now being strongly coupled with user experience. The perception of what the most helpful site for users is being fine-tuned.
You may have the best content, but if your website loads slowly, and the images shift and change during loading, your ranking will suffer.
Engage with your SEO experts to run reports and find ways to hone the speed and user experience of your online presence.
Recommended Reading: Complete Guide to Technical SEO – Core Web Vitals
Where should your page sit in terms of benchmark loading speed? What is the average speed of websites that you compete with?
According to Semrush’s How fast is fast enough article:
If you’re using one of the popular Content Management Systems out there, what are they doing to help you with Page Speed in preparation for the Core Web Vitals update?
In August of 2020, Shopify rolled out its Site Speed feature. There is a speed dial at the bottom of your Shopify site when you’re logged into the CMS. What this does is measure your speed in comparison to other Shopify merchants.
Shopify is fast, in general, and what you’re looking at is the speed of your site compared to others in your arena.
Google Lighthouse is used to calculate this speed score for you.
Has this score, looking low, affected sales? No, not really. Is there a reason it is so slow? Images, probably. Should you be that concerned with your Shopify site? In a nutshell, no.
Over 40% of the web is powered by WordPress. The fact that it is open source is fantastic. It means anyone with some skill can create plugins to make your WordPress experience better. The problem is, if you begin to install a lot of widgets and plugins, they can dramatically slow your website down.
Many WordPress sites are static, as in they’re just blogs or photo albums, so the general tips for speeding up the site would apply – image compression, structure, and so forth.
But for those who have plugins and widgets, consider these options:
A headless CMS is a system that ONLY manages the content. A different tool manages and delivers the front-end web experience. An API fetches the content for the front page when required.
A dedicated front end can mean much faster speed results. Less code as well for the bots to read, so more speed.
The separation of these two elements also means you can update and recode the front end dynamically while the back end with the data stays static.
Page speed is becoming a much more important factor in page ranking, thanks to the pending Core Web Vitals. Milliseconds matter.
As it is a reflection of User Experience, and the Mobile First approach is a big factor, the more streamlined you can make your website, the better it will serve you for Google ranking, and the better it can serve your future customers.
We have many other articles on our website to help you with your SEO, and we have our Hawk Academy to teach you how you can work SEO yourself.
If you want to know more or want some awesome people working on your SEO, contact us today and get on board for as little as $500 a month.
Originally published on Studio Hawk.
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