You’ve created a beautiful new website for your company.
You spent tons of time (and money) designing, editing, updating until you were happy.
But now that your newly created website is live, you notice one problem. And that problem is slow page speed, which is undoubtedly a matter of concern.
Yes, slow speed is a matter of concern because the load time of your site has a serious impact on various things like:
- How long visitors stay on your site
- How many of them turn into paying customers
- Your ranking in organic search results
- How much you pay on a CPC basis in paid search
High loading speed is a crucial element of developing a search engine optimized website, and it simply cannot be overlooked.
Sadly, most websites fail to meet the right website speed. And this leaves a bad taste on the user’s experience and many other essential things, while also being seen as a negative signal for search engines.
But everything has a solution. Fortunately, there are tons of amazing agencies and consultants that offer quality SEO services. Just be sure to do your research to ensure you select a company that really knows what they are doing.
If you want to improve your results and boost your revenue, this write-up will assist you in resolving issues that are leading to low page speed.
Before we really dig in, let’s answer two important questions:
- What’s a good page speed?
- How does your SEO depend on your page speed?
Table of Contents
What’s a Good Page Load Time?
Google leads us to believe that the truly optimized sites should load in 3 seconds or less. According to Google’s current benchmark report findings, most sites do not stand up to that measure. Google’s study observed that 70% of the pages online took around 7 seconds to load – that’s not good.
When you improve your site, you can use recommendations directed by Google to calculate your performance. Google being the largest search engine, taking care to adhere to what the search engine giant wants is a good idea.
How does your SEO Depend on Page Speed?
Page speed is one of the most important factors in any website’s rankings. This essential factor cannot be taken for granted while developing a website.
A website with fasting loading times makes a great first impression on your visitors. It creates a good user experience for the website audience. That’s why it’s important to focus on the basics of SEO and look at the quick SEO wins like page speed.
A major proportion of search engine users click on the top 5 recommended suggestions. So, to gain more and more organic traffic to your website, your site needs to be at the top of these results.
To be at the top of search results, you need to have solid on- and off-page SEO, as well as things like page speed in place. These are of utmost importance to users but also for improving the usability of the website.
Now, let’s jump into learning about a few tips that can help you to determine why your site is loading slowly and what to do about it.
What Can Help You Improve Your Page Speed for SEO?
Optimize images
The most important thing one should keep strictly in their mind is not to use images of large size. Images should be in the right file format. Use PNGs for graphics and JPEGs for better photography.
Large size images become the most major reason for slowing down the speed of your website. For frequently used images, always try to make a template by using CSS sprites. it also combines your images organized into one large image that loads at once. By doing this, you save plenty of time and prevent your visitors from twiddling their thumbs while waiting for multiple images to load.
There are many plugins available for compressing images on your page. Here are few of the top plugins we recommend:
- You can make use of a Gzip software application for file compression. This can help you in reducing the size of your CSS, JAVASCRIPT, and HTML files.
- And with the help of Adobe Photoshop, you can compress images while retaining their quality.
- Shortpixel is a WordPress plugin that manages to compress both new as well as old images on your blog. It assures you keep all your processed files safe and secure in the best possible way. In addition to this, it never compromises on your image quality no matter what the size of your image.
Optimizing Video
It’s important to optimize your videos to boost your website speed. Your videos can be enhanced by performing these tasks:
- Choose the standard format – Use MP4 because it produces the smallest size.
- Minimize video length
- Try to compress video files
- Skip audio tracks if the video is used as a design element in the background
- Act to preserve the optimal size dimensions based on visitor’s screen size.
Minimize Server Response Time
You can erase all unnecessary white space and comments by minimizing your CSS and javascript files. By doing this you attain a reduced size file.
And the best part is for performing this task you simply need to make use of a few tools that are easily available online.
Several plugins that are available such as:
- W3 total cache
- WP super cache
- WP rocket
Reduce Redirects
The more redirects you put on your page, the more it leads to forcing your visitors to face additional waiting for each HTTP request-response. Too many redirects causes an extremely negative impact on speed, especially on mobile devices.
Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Do use a content delivery network (CDN) to enhance the loading speed of the page. CDN aims to deliver web pages and other web content to a user based on the geographic locations of the user.
A CDN aims to minimize the path information has to travel between the server and user. A CDN is simply a network of servers, in spite of a single server, with locations in multiple geographic locations.
When a user accesses a website, information is pulled from the server location closest to them. The result is a faster flow of data and prevention of slow loading time.
Install a Caching Tool
Browser caching is another tool that aims to enhance your site’s page speed.
Fetching the resources to load your website takes a lot of effort. It requires loading each image and page which leads to heavy HTML and coding. Each time when someone loads your site, this process happens all over again. Thus, your site will take too long to load. Browser caching plays a vital role in helping you out.
Do use W3 Total Cache, it’s the most used popular plugin on the market. It is specially designed to enhance at least 10x speed on your website. This tool also promises to minify HTML, JAVASCRIPT, AND CSS by providing you up to 80% bandwidth savings.
Conclusion
Hence, from the above discussion, we can conclude how high quality speed and load times plays a major role in improving your page speed through and giving a boost to your SEO. Nowadays, people don’t want to wait 10 seconds for your site to load when Google offers so many results, many of which will load fast.
If your site is extremely slow, and Google observes people bouncing, it will drop you in the SERPs. It is of great importance that you must score 100% over Google’s speed insights or nearly close to it.
Do make optimum use of good plugins to boost up the speed of your page, it will help your site load much faster.
Do let us know via the comment section below how this write-up has been productive to you.
Thanks for your precious time!
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Page speed is really essential to users because, well, faster pages are more efficient & provide a much better on-page user experience. I love the way you provide info in this article, audience who will come & read this will get advantage from this, I’m certain.
So true, Aaron. Slow-loading pages can crush your site. Visitors will leave, and search engines will mark that as a negative factor in their rankings. Thanks for reading!
Boosting page speed can do more than improve organic performance; it can also increase conversions.
So true on both accounts, Robert. A lot of site owners overlook the importance of site speed and they wonder why organic traffic, conversions, and critical stats aren’t where they hoped they’d be.