Google has stated that page speed is a ranking factor for SEO, and this means that if your website is slow, you will have a harder time ranking in Google's search engine results pages. In this blog post, we will discuss how page speed impacts your SEO ranking and what you can do to improve it. We will also provide some tips on how to make your website faster.
What is Page Speed?
The speed at which a single page loads on your website is called page speed due to various elements on the page. Images, scripts, and plugins are several examples of these variables.
A high loading time can result in individuals bouncing off your website, which is bad for business, as it means you're losing potential customers and revenue. To maintain quality page speed, be sure to optimize images, minify scripts and codes, and leverage browser caching.
What is Site Speed?
Site speed is the speed that your site loads as users navigate through it. The faster your site loads, the better the user experience will be. In addition to providing a better user experience, improving your site's speed can also help you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
There are many ways to improve your site's speed, including optimizing images, reducing server response time, and minifying JavaScript and CSS files. You can also use a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify specific areas to make improvements.
How Can Your Page Speed Affect SEO
Page speed has always been a factor in SEO, and now it's even more important with the introduction of mobile-first indexing. As mentioned above, yes, it does. Page load speed (and overall site speed) is a crucial component of user experience. Users expect websites to load quickly, and if your pages are slow to load, you're going to lose visitors. In addition to affecting user experience, page speed also affects your rankings. Google has said that page load time is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages.
What Are The Core Web Vitals?
The current set of Core Web Vitals for 2022 focuses on three metrics—LCP, FID, and CLS. These three metrics measure a page's user experience by focusing on loading, interactivity, and visual stability.
Largest Contentful Paint
The point at which the user can understand the largest rendered content on the webpage. It's important to consider what is happening in this paint, as it represents the most critical moment from a performance standpoint. In particular, you'll want to ensure that your largest and most important elements are loaded and visible before users start scrolling.
First Input Delay
A metric that captures a user's first impression of a site's interactivity and responsiveness. It measures the time between when a user interacts with your page and when they see feedback from your site (e.g. paint, layout changes, etc). This is especially important on mobile devices, where users are often impatient and leave your page.
Cumulative Layout Shift
This metric is a score that indicates how much the page has changed since it was first displayed. A poor user experience will raise your CLS score if a webpage moves locations after being initially displayed.
How to Check Your Website Speed and Performance
Lighthouse
Lighthouse is a Google developer tool, and it's powered by the Lighthouse platform, which may be accessed through Chrome as well as in Google Analytics. PageSpeed Insights grades your website on a 100-point scale, with higher scores indicating better performance. The report provides actionable insights to improve your score. Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. It runs in Chrome and Firefox Developer Tools and on Android and iOS devices.
GTmetrix
GTmetrix is a website speed check tool that measures how fast your website loads. You can use GTmetrix to diagnose problems with your website and find optimizations to improve your page loading times. To get started, simply enter the URL of the website you want to analyze. GTmetrix will run a series of tests on your site and generate a report with performance insights and recommendations. The report will show you how long it took your website to load, as well as the following:
- Page size
- Number of requests
- Response time
- YSlow score
- Potential optimizations
You can use this information to make changes to your website to improve your website loading speed.
Dareboost
Dareboost is a great tool to help you check the quality and performance of your website. It provides a report that is easy to understand, with simple graphs and charts. You can use Dareboost to test different aspects of your website, such as page speed, load time, responsiveness, and more.
You can also use Dareboost to compare the performance of your website to that of your competitors. This can help you identify areas where you need to make improvements to boost your website's speed and performance. Using Dareboost is a great way to ensure that your website runs as smoothly as possible.
How to Improve Page Load Speed
You've just learned what metrics go into page speed, so you'll need to know how to boost the page load speed for your most important pages. Here are a few things you may do to improve page speed and increase your Core Web Vitals score.
Avoid landing page redirects
There are a few ways to avoid landing page redirects. One way is to use relative URLs in your links instead of absolute URLs, and this will help keep the number of redirects down. You can also use the 301 permanent redirects to move a page from one URL to another permanently. The 301 redirection tells search engines that the old URL has been moved and that they should update their indexes accordingly.
Use a CDN
A CDN can help improve your page load time. A CDN (also known as a POP) is a geographically dispersed group of servers, and they operate in tandem to speed up the delivery of your online material. By using a CDN, you can decrease the distance between your visitors and the server that is delivering your content. This will help improve your page load time. There are several different CDN providers that you can use. Some popular providers i nclude Akamai, CloudFlare, and MaxCDN. You can also use Google's own CDN, called Google Cloud Platform.
Minify CSS and JavaScript
By minifying your CSS and JavaScript files, you can reduce their size and improve the page load time. Minification is the process of removing unnecessary characters from code without changing its functionality, and this can be done manually or using a tool. Many online tools can help you minify your CSS and JavaScript files, including the YUI Compressor. Simply paste your code into the tool, and it will compress it for you. You can also minify HTML files by removing unnecessary white space and comments. However, be careful not to remove anything that could affect how your page looks or functions.
Optimize images to improve page load speed
If you use any images on your website, it's important to optimize them for faster page loading. One easy way to do this is by using a compression tool to reduce the size of your images before uploading them to your website or blog. There are many different compression tools available, but one of my favorites is imagecompressor.com
Remove render-blocking JavaScript from your website
When your web pages load in a browser, a call is sent to every script, often at other URLs. This can cause unnecessary delays in page rendering. This occurs when specific scripts from third-party vendors are blocked from loading, which can cause your page to take longer to load. Fortunately, there are several ways to address this issue. One way is to use the async attribute on your script tags, and this will tell the browser to load the scripts asynchronously, which can help improve page load speed. If you're still having issues with page load speed, you may need to consider limiting the number of third-party scripts that are loaded on your page.
