Did you know that as a page’s load time increases from one to three seconds, the probability of people leaving your website moves to 32%? This is a lot of lost traffic. But did you know that can impact your SEO?
To attract organic visitors, you need a fast website. Read on as we discuss the effect of site speed on SEO.
Site Speed Importance
Site speed impacts your SEO in a number of ways. These can be broken down into two distinct areas.
Google and other search engines actively use your site loading speed to evaluate your SEO score. This is because a slow-loading site is one that generally is not as usable as one that loads quickly.
A secondary effect of slow site load speed is that people leave your site quickly. If it takes time to load, people will not wait, but go elsewhere. This impacts a metric called your bounce rate, also part of search engine algorithms used to see if your content is providing value to visitors.
What Is a Good Site Load Speed?
It is recommended by Google and other search engines that websites should perform a site speed test that comes in at under two seconds. There are a number of websites and tools where you can check site speed, one of the most used being Google’s own page speed insights. Run a few tests to determine your average score. Your site speed can vary based on time of day, current site visitors and other factors.
Want to test multiple pages with minimum effort? Check out this nifty bulk page speed test tool. You can test your desktop or mobile speeds, a selected group of URL’s, or every page in your site at once.
Mobile Devices
A good site speed on a desktop alone is also not enough. More internet searches originate on mobile devices these days. Therefore, it is important that your website optimizes its mobile site speed as well as desktop.
Not only does the speed matter, but the site itself should be responsive. This means it will adapt to fit any screen, changing image sizes and text.
Improving Speed
It can be extremely tough – and frustrating – to improve your page speed. One element may improve but you find another has slowed down. Try tweaking the following to see if you can make an improvement:
Clean up Code
Excess code makes your site much heavier and slower. You can improve site speed by deleting unnecessary or unwanted plugins, themes, and applications. After this, hire a professional coder to minify code on your website.
Images
Large images can really slow your page load speed. Make sure you have a maximum pixel size for feature images and a smaller size for internal images. Install an image compressor to make the file sizes smaller.
Check Your Hosting
Your host is the server that stores all of your website code and files. Beware – not all hosting or packages are created equal. Speak with the providers and see if they can upgrade you to dedicated servers – or look at moving your website elsewhere. Pixaura utilizes dedicated Siteground cloud hosting for all of our clients. For custom web-based apps, we use AWS hosting for our clients.
CDN – Content Delivery Network
CDN is a content delivery network or content distribution network. A CDN is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially relative to end-users.
Staying Fast
Site speed needs regular checkups. It is not something you can leave and forget about. As the web changes and your site adds pages, features and functions, you need regularly updates.
If you need assistance improving your speed, Pixaura should be your first stop. We specialize in SEO services, but we also have a range of digital services, from web design to advertising. Contact us to discuss your needs and let us help you thrive in the digital economy.
