How Important is Page Speed for SEO?
In the ever evolving world of digital marketing, SEO and page speed go hand in hand. The importance of having a fast-loading website cannot be stressed enough. Page speed performance is a critical ranking factor which Google has openly stated in their various announcements regarding how their algorithm works to a certain degree. Having a fast loading website is essentially providing a great user-experience for your website visitors. If your site is slow-loading, it will likely result in a user abandoning their session only on our website or viewing your brand or business as untrustworthy. This would not be ideal, as you could lose potential customers, clients, patients, etc… simply due to a slow-loading site. Take the right steps towards optimizing your website’s page speed by reading our latest post on the topic, from our team of SEO experts at DASH-SEO!
Understanding Page Speed
To understand page speed, we first have to examine what page speed is in the first place. Page speed is how quickly a page’s content loads upon request when visiting the website in question. With the exponential rise in mobile-first browsing, page speed (especially page speed catered to mobile devices) is more important than ever before. Page speed will ultimately impact everything involved with user-experience and satisfaction, to overall bounce rates, to your website’s organic position on search engines.
The Impact of Page Speed on SEO
Google has explicitly mentioned, on multiple occasions, that page speed is one of the most important ranking factors when it determines who is able to reach the coveted first page of search results. In 2010, it was officially announced as a true ranking factor for desktop searches. As of 2018, it was announced as a true ranking factor for mobile searches as well. Below, you’ll discover how page speed impacts a variety of components when it comes to your website’s performance:
User Experience
A slow-loading page may significantly affect overall user-experience. Google estimates the probability of a bounce off of your website increases around 30-35% as the page load time increases from one second to three seconds. If your website does take longer than three seconds to load, users are very likely to abandon the session altogether and go elsewhere for a solution to their problem. A fast-loading website experience is crucial in today’s competition-focused times. A satisfying, fast-loading website will offer a much better user-experience when compared to a slow-loading website. When you have a faster loading website, it will allow your users to browse through your entire website with ease; leading to higher conversion rates, as they’ll find the entire experience to be seamless without issue. Additionally, this extension of browsing times will signal to Google your site must be doing something right, as when the ASD (Average Session Duration) of your website is longer than your competitors, it will indicate to Google that your site is providing engaging content and will be subsequently rewarded with higher rankings.
Conversion Rates
Page speed will also greatly affect your overall conversion rate with your website. Many studies indicate that a delay of even one extra second may reduce website conversions by up to 7%. If you own and operate an e-commerce site, this could ultimately translate into significant revenue losses. When you have a faster loading website, you’re able to provide a much smoother checkout experience, in turn encouraging purchases.
Search Engine Rankings
Search engines will always aim to provide their users with the best possible user-experience. This means search engines will prioritize fast-loading websites over slow-loading websites nearly every time they can do so. Slow-loading websites will often have lower rankings than their fast-loading competitors. If you find yourself in a highly competitive niche, such as law, healthcare, or financial services; you’ll want a fast-loading website.
Engagement Metrics
Page speed will also influence the overall engagement metrics your site produces. Page speed will affect time on your website, pages viewed per session, and bounce rate. A faster-loading site will encourage users to engage much more thoroughly with your content throughout your site, which will positively influence your organic search engine rankings over time. Improved engagement metrics will not only improve your organic rankings from an SEO perspective, they will also improve your awareness and visibility of your brand, leading to a more loyal audience base over time.
How to Measure Page Speed
In order to measure page speed, it’s essential to have a benchmark of how your site is performing today, and where it could be performing in the future. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is one of the best tools to gauge where your site stands today, and what you need to do in order to improve your site speed going forward. Click here to check your site speed now!
Using Google’s PageSpeed Insights:
- Performance Score: Google will provide you with a performance score which ranges from 0-100. Scores 90+ are considered excellent, while scores below 50 are considered very slow-loading and need to be addressed as soon as possible.
- Field Data: This section will showcase real-world usability data for the specified URL.
- Lab Data: Lab data will help to identify any performance issues which may not be visible through the field state section alone.
- Opportunities & Diagnostics: This section refers to recommendations which are presented to improve your site’s overall page speed performance.
Strategies to Improve Page Speed
Improving your site’s page speed requires efforts across multiple fronts, with a mix of both technical and strategic modifications to your site:
Optimize Images
Large images take longer to load. Optimizing images by compressing them and adjusting their dimensions can significantly reduce their file size without a noticeable loss in quality. Larger file-size images will take longer to load than those image fields which are compressed in order to load faster. There are plenty of tools to reduce the image’s file size, but not degrade quality (TinyPNG, Adobe Illustrator, etc…).
Minimize HTTP Requests
Reducing the number of elements on the page you’re attempting to optimize for page speed purposes will help to decrease the number of HTTP requests required to load the page.
Use Asynchronous Loading for CSS & JavaScript
Modifying the way your CSS and JavaScript files load through making them asynchronous will assist in not blocking the display of content on the page.
Leverage Browser Caching
Browser caching is when the webpage stores the resource files on a local computer for when a user revisits a webpage. “Leveraging Browser Caching” specifically means you can choose how long web browsers should retain images, CSS, and JS stored locally. Through this measure a visitor is able to visit another page on your website, and then your website stores the previously loaded images, CSS, and JS to improve load times when they return to said page, as the content is retrieved from the browser’s cache instead of the server itself.
Improve Server Response Time
Your server response times are heavily affected by the amount of traffic you end up receiving on a daily or sometimes hourly basis. In addition to the traffic you receive, the resources each individual page utilizes, the specific software used by your server, and the quality of hosting and CDN (content delivery network) your site utilizes will all greatly affect the underlying page speed. To best improve server response time, you should aim to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks such as slow database queries, slow routing, or a lack of adequate memory.
Contact Us at DASH-SEO for Help Improving Your Website’s Page Speed Performance & SEO
As mentioned throughout this post, page speed is not just an essential aspect of providing a great user-experience, it’s also a crucial element for your overall SEO performance. Through improving your website’s loading times and page speed, you’ll be prioritizing not only your user-experience efforts, you’ll be prioritizing catering to search engine robots and you’ll likely see a significant improvement in organic rankings on search engines such as Google. Contact us using the form below to see how we can help improve your site speed and your site’s entire SEO performance. We look forward to hearing from you soon!