How Page Speed Affects SEO & Google Rankings?

We all know that SEO can be incredibly extensive. You need to think about many things when dealing with it. There are optimization, security, mobile-friendliness, and page speed, of course. Now, did you ever ask yourself just how page speed affects SEO & Google rankings? Well, it turns out it's a lot. But, before we go any further, you need to understand what page speed is.

What is Page Speed?

Page speed is a time that the web page takes to load. It's important to mention that it shouldn't be confused with site speed. That is actually a page speed for a sample of page views on the whole site. Know that there are cases of businesses fail because of the bad website, so you can imagine how important this is. Now, we can look at page speed in two ways. One is page load time, which is the needed time for displaying content on a specific page fully. The other one would be time to the first byte. This is the time that passes before your browser receives the first byte of information from the server.

There is a lot of software you can use to improve your site, but people seem to settle on Google's PageSpeed Insights. It uses and incorporates data from Chrome User Experience to determine your metrics. But, more on that later on.

How Page Speed Affects SEO

According to research that Google did, just one-second delay in mobile load can decrease conversion rates by as much as 20 percent. Slow load time leads to bad user experience, and that leads to a lower number of visitors and customers on your website. It is that simple.

Luckily, there are some tricks that you can use to increase your page load speed. You could simply use the services of a company like wpfullcare.com is to take care of everything. Or you can go even further into the details. But, if you use all the tips and tools in the right manner, you won't worry about how page speed affects SEO & Google rankings as your traffic will be boosted, and SEO will become better.

Check Your Website Speed

As we have already mentioned, there are many options when it comes to software that you can use for this application. However, some of them are simply a better and more confident way of determining wanted metrics.

Google Page-Speed Insights

Well, the name pretty much speaks for itself. Who can be better at giving insights about your webpage than Google itself? It is indeed the best tool for checking page speed and it offers a good amount of information about how fast your site loads on both desktop and mobile devices.

And it doesn't stop there. It advises you how to improve load time and how to decrease file size. It simply helps you decide what things to load first. And the best thing about it is that you don't need to understand too much of it if you want to improve your page.

WebPage Test

If you want to go the other way from Google, there are a few options. One of them being the WebPage Test. It enables you to check the loading time of your website from different devices as well as from different server locations. Therefore it suggests itself as a handy tool to have. Especially when you're thinking about redesigning your website.

Pingdom

This is a third-party tool that is free to use, and it offers a lot of insights on improving your website. It focuses on the list of specific things that you can do to fix the problems on your pages. You can also check your site speed from seven different locations. Unfortunately, they're all predefined but, that doesn't have to be a bad thing.

Tips On Increasing Your Page Speed

As we promised, here are the tips that you need to follow if you want not to worry anymore about how page speed affects SEO & Google rankings.

Enable Gzip Compression

Now, as you probably already understand, when a visitor on your website clicks on a page, it makes a call to server and transfers requested files. However, when the files are large it can take a lot of time for your browser to load everything. If you lower the size of your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files that are larger than 150 bytes you'll reduce file transfer time for quite a lot. This should be your priority when trying to boost the speed of your website.

Minify CSS, HTML, and JavaScript

This is a kind of next-level compression. Although it isn't actually a compression. This process removes unnecessary space or characters from the code, and therefore it reduces the size of files quite marginally. Of course, you don't have to worry that minifying will damage your pages. It just removes new-line characters, whitespace characters, block delimiters, and comments wrote during writing it.

Bring the Number of Redirects To a Minimum

This is something that people often forget about, and it's not an important thing like building a strong job description is. But, whenever you redirect someone to another page, he or she has to wait for the main page to load. That takes time and we don't want that. It happens because it takes some time for the HTTP request-response cycle to finish.

Get Rid of Render Blocking JavaScript

If you don't know what it is, render-blocking JavaScript is a thing that prevents your page from loading. Google recommends avoiding using these or at least bringing it to the bare minimum. Especially when it comes to the first fold of the website.

This is actually simple to understand. For instance, if you're using jQuery for something that is happening below the fold, you don't have to load it in the first fold. So, just stop things from loading when they're not needed or wanted.

Improve your Server Response Time

Well, the name tells you everything you need to know pretty much. If you improve your server response time, the amount of time that it takes for the page to load will be lower. Or at least time to the first byte will be faster, which is an important thing.

After finishing all of these steps, you won't think about how page speed affects SEO & Google rankings as you won't need to. Enjoy your new, improved and faster website.