How Page Speed Affects Your Google’s Ranking and SEO?

What is Page Speed?

Page Speed is the amount of time a web page takes to load. It is based on many factors such as website host server, page file size, and image size. If you want to increase your sales, you have to make your site load faster. 

According to Google research, a 1-second delay in mobile load times can decrease conversion rates by 20%.  

“Google Speed Update” on July 2018 declared page speed as a ranking factor for searches on mobile. This update will affect web pages that deliver the slow experience to its users.

Slow page load time can create a bad user experience, resulting in lower numbers of visitors and a high bounce rate.

In this article, I will share with a few tricks to help your website load faster and boost traffic and search engine rankings.

• What is Page Speed?
• Why Page Speed is Important for SEO?
• Tools To Check Your Page Speed?
• How to Speed Up Website?

We can further describe Page Speed in the following manner:-

• Fully Loaded Page: It means how much time it takes for all the resources on a page to load.
• Time to First Byte (TTFB): It is the amount of time it takes for a page to initiate the loading process.
• First Meaningful Paint/First Contextual Paint: It is the amount of time a web page takes to load its first fold or an interactive section.

Let’s understand all the 3 terms with the help of an example:-

1. If you land on a web page and get a white screen for a few seconds, that is Time to First Byte (TTFB).
2. A page takes 10 seconds to load completely but it takes only 1.5 sec to load its first fold.
3. Therefore, even though it takes 10 seconds for the page to load its all resources, a user still has something to engage with after 1.5 seconds. So to that user, your page is fast.

11 Tips to Boost your Magento Site Speed

Why Page Speed is Important for SEO?

A slow-loading website can hurt your search engine rankings. An average mobile site takes 15 seconds to load whereas a desktop site takes load time of around 8-11 seconds.

Slow Google site speed creates a poor User experience and every second loses you, visitors and customers. It is crucial to understand the factors responsible for slow page speed and where you can improve things to speed it up. Here’s how you can do just that.

Must Read: What is SEO Spam and How to Protect Your Site?

How to Check Your Website Speed?

1. Google Page-Speed Insights

Who can give you better insights on your webpage than Google?

Google site speed insight is the best tool to check the web page speed and is hosted as part of Google Developers. It offers a detailed description of how fast your site loads on both desktop and mobile.  

It gives you suggestions to improve the load time, decrease file size and server calls in the sequence of low, medium, and high priority. Therefore, it helps you decide which steps to take first. If you are technically-strong, you can also try Google’s Lighthouse tool to get a detailed analysis of areas to improve on your site.

2. Pingdom

Pingdom is a third-party tool that offers a lot of insight into how to improve your site. It gives you a list of specific fixes that you can do to improve the speed and health of your site. Pingdom Page Speed Tool is free to use and you can check your site’s speed in 7 different predefined locations.

Quick Tip- For more accurate results, always check your page load time from locations that are nearest to your server.

3. WebPage Test

 WebPage Test allows you to check your website’s loading time from different devices and from different server locations. You can also check and compare page load times on different browsers. 

4. GTmetrix

GTmetrix gives your webpage a letter grade to show how well it loads. You can also check the YSlow score, fully loaded time, total page size and number of server requests. It allows you to set automatic alerts to get notified when your site begins to load at a speed below a specific threshold.

How to Optimize Your Site Speed?

1. Enable Gzip Compression

When a visitor hits your website a call is made to your server to transfer the requested files. The larger these files are the longer it’s going to take for them to get to your browser and display on the screen.

You have to lower the size of your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files that are larger than 150 bytes to reduce file transfer time. It should be your top priority in the list of page speed optimizations.

1. Reduce the size of a webpage by up to 70%
2. Enhance the page speed
3. The cost-benefit ratio is high

2. Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML

The process of Minify involves the removal of unnecessary space or characters from the code. These spaces and characters add to the size of the file and increases page load time.

When you get rid of these, the files become lighter which in turn lowers the page loading time. Minification removes the following things from CC, JavaScript, and HTML-

1. New-line character
2. Whitespace characters
3. Block delimiters
4. Comments

3. Decrease the number of Redirects

Whenever you redirect a web page to another page, the user spends additional time waiting for the main page to load. It is so because it takes some time for the HTTP request-response cycle to complete.

Let’s understand it with the help of an example:-

If your mobile redirect pattern appears like this: “abc.com -> www.abc.com -> m.abc.com -> m.abc.com/home,” each of those two extra redirects makes your page load slower.

4. Eliminate Render-blocking JavaScript

Render-blocking JavaScript means JavaScript that is preventing a page from loading. Google recommends you to either avoid or minimize the use of render-blocking JavaScript that interferes with the loading of the first fold of the website.  

For example, if you are using jQuery for what is happening below the fold, then there is no need to load it in the first fold. Hence avoiding it where it is not needed helps in page speed optimization.

5. Leverage Browser Caching for Images, CSS and JS

Leverage browser caching means that you can specify how long the web browser can keep your Images, CSS and JSS. It helps in improving the loading time of your site as the user will now download less data while visiting your site.

You can add the following lines to your .htaccess file to enable it:

You can modify a .htaccess file via FTP, or the File Manager in cPanel.

6. Improve Server Response Time

Improving server response time can reduce the amount of time it takes for a page to initiate the loading process or Time to First Byte.

It can be achieved in the following ways:-

1. Examine your web hosting provider
2. Select your web server according to your requirements.
3. Improve the efficiency of web servers.
4. Decrease bloat.
5. Optimize Database.

7. Use a Content Distribution Network (CDN)

Using CDN is important to improve your site’s performance. It functions by spreading the server load across a number of locations and enabling the nearest server to provide data to local users. The geographical distance makes the web page to load faster.

Read: Why CDN is a Must for a Faster Store?

8. Optimizing images

Larger images are one of the most important factors that affect the website speed adversely. Therefore, you must ensure that they are in the right size and format. For example,

1. PNG format works best for infographics with < 16 colors.
2. JPEG format works best for photographs.

Minifying images to optimum size without affeopcting the quality of an image is also crucial. Use CSS sprites to combine your images into 1 large image that loads all at once (results in lower HTTP requests) and then show only the sections you want to display.

This lowers the load time by not making visitors wait for multiple images to load.

Bonus Tip: You can check how well optimized images are using the Sitechecker tool. This tool helps you find out website size or a specific page size.

9. Get a Better Hosting

The last but not the least is having a high performance hosting for your website.

Shared hosting, or low resource hosting will prevent your website to load faster, despite all the optimizations. But you do not need to buy a dedicated server from the first step.

The best step is to buy the hosting that is optimized for the platform your website is built on. If it’s on WordPress, go with WordPress hosting, and if it’s on Magento, it’s better to have Magento hosting.

At ServerGuy, we provide all type of hosting, and with the performance and uptime guarantee.

Quick Summary

1. Page Speed is the amount of time a web page takes to load. Ideally, the loading time of your website must be less than 3 seconds.
2. A slow website can adversely affect your search engine rankings, user experience, and retention.
3. To find the factors responsible for slow page speed, use tools such as GTmetrix, Google Page Insights, Webpage Test, etc.
4. Optimize your WebPage by minifying codes, reducing image sizes, getting rid of unwanted scripts and redirects, leveraging caching and improving server response.
5. The website host server is one of the important factors on which the site speed depends. So, choosing the right one is crucial.

Learn How to Choose the Best Dedicated Server?

Hope you find this article useful. We would love to hear your feedback. If you have any questions regarding this topic, then do leave a comment below.

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