Website speed is one of the most critical factors for organic traffic. This has become so important that even Google now has made this one of the ranking factors. Over the last few years, Google has been taking action for improving website loading speeds and offering specific tools for webmasters and developers. The Google Lighthouse stays to be one amongst them.
But how exactly does the insight from tools like PageSpeed from Google work? And the most important question here is how is Page speed affects SEO? We are going to learn everything right here!
Some time ago tools like PageSpeed were not that great. All of the information available was also easily found elsewhere and this in reality didn’t even indicate speed. However, with the recent updates, there have been changes made and the tool has also become much better. The only problem is that it has also become slightly difficult to understand too.
Let’s learn more about the importance of page speed for SEO and Google Rankings today!
Page Speed: What is it?
Page Speed can be called the duration that it takes for the content display of a specific website page through the first byte of the server. Or in simpler terms the time it takes for any browser to get the first information from a server.
All of the page elements, the HTML codes, CSS that is styling page elements, images, JavaScript files, and multimedia also affect the speed of a page. Everything beginning from the smallest elements to web server speed that it has been hosted on will impact the page loading speeds. In other words, if you have bought a cheap web hosting then your website will suffer due to speed. However, if you want to buy the best cheap web hosting company in India then Bluehost is a good option for you.
The Page speed can be measured on mobile devices and desktops separately. The main reason for this is that there is a technology difference between these two and therefore results in varied experiences for mobile and desktop users.
Ways in which Page Speed Affects SEO & Google Rankings
The page speed stays to be critical for the users as the faster it loads more efficient it is and also provides a much better user experience. As per the recent reports, in case the page takes more than just 3 seconds to get loaded, about a quarter of the viewers are going to click away from it and select another result.
Understand that more bounce rate is something that SEO doesn’t want us to do!
Then when we speak of mobile users they also expect a much faster loading speed. In one of the surveys conducted it was found that about 73 % of the users had reported websites they visited had low loading speeds.
Then page speed also has an impact on conversion rates. For instance, Walmart when increased the page speed by one second, there was a two percent of conversion increase observed.
But page speed also seems to be critical for SEO. In the year 2010, Google had also announced that page speed can be included as one of the ranking factors for the search index. Then in 2017, Google also declared that they are going to give more consideration to page speed and include the mobile website speed for the ranking site on the pages for ‘mobile-first or the pages that personalize rankings for the mobile websites.
Google has also been experimenting with AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages Project) that aims at making pages load at faster speeds for mobile devices.
Even recently, the search engines also expanded the significance of user experience by introducing the page experience as one of the ranking signals. Now when this gets combined with the Core Web Vitals and the present metrics such as smartphone friendliness and secure browsing this creates a search signal for the complete Page experience.
The aim of Page Experience is for evaluating the web pages through the quality of a website user experience it provides for common people. In simple terms, the on-page factors and other criteria of Google will impact the user experience while they consume content.
As we can see that the Page speed is now amongst the critical factors affecting everything.
How Can You Improve Page Speed?
Once you have the precise idea of Page speed that you have been dealing with, this will be the time for working towards enhancing performance. Be sure that you are observing the results of the website page speed test and see the areas that need the most of your attention. Here are the other ways that can help you to improve page speed and that in turn can assist with better Google Ranking and SEO strategy!
- Optimize the website code for website performance and loading time improvement.
- Have an application that’s compression enabling for reducing the file size thus you have faster page speed.
- Make use of images that are clear in quality but smaller in size.
Final thoughts:
Page Speed has always been one of the important factors for a better user experience. Now when Google has called it as one of the components for ranking algorithms, Page speed can be seen critical factor to focus on for page views and ranking.
