Why Page Speed is Crucial for SEO and How to Improve It?

In today's digitally dominated era where users expect instant response and productivity, page speed is not just a formality but a necessity for effective SEO. Are you looking forward to enhance your user experience, improve engagement metrics, and boost your search engine rankings? If yes, then you are on the right page. When it comes to decide how to rank your site, page load speed should be taken into account as it is the most essential ranking factor according to Google algorithms. Google says that while faster pages provide a better user experience, whereas slow page loading impacts the SEO negatively making it a less user-friendly interface which can lower a site's ranking in search results. To fix this problem, SEO techniques like image optimisation, leveraging browser caching, minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, and using a content delivery network (CDN) has proved to be paramount. If you are looking to scale up your e-commerce conversion rate with a better user management of SEO, it is essential combine your page speed with real-world data and user experience metrics. Several studies has shown that users are likely to abandon a site if it takes longer time for loading. Therefore, it is important for you to understand the process of page loading and thereby implement it for a better user experience in the first place. This user guide will help you understand the technicality and step by step process of improving page speed comprehensively. Let's dive in!

Page Speed: A Crucial Element for SEO

If you are a beginner looking forward to improve your user experience, it is essential to work upon your site's page speed. It is common that users expect websites to load quickly. A website that loads quickly and properly is always preferred by the users rather than the one that takes longer time to load pages. Such delays can lead to frustration and increased bounce rates. By ensuring your site loads its content and interactive features as quickly as possible you can improve your search rankings and optimize your site for Google's ever-changing algorithms. Also, faster sites are likely to keep users engaged longer, leading to lower bounce rates and higher conversions.

On the other hand, when it comes to boost your website's ranking, Google considers page speed as a crucial factor. Make sure that your site loads faster if you are aiming to rank higher in the search results. It is also recommended by Google to focus on Core Web Vitals which specifically measure loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. However, if you are aiming to improve your mobile responsiveness thereby scaling up your user retention, it is crucial to optimize the page speed on mobile as the majority of searches happening on mobile devices. A higher optimizing page speed for mobile can certainly boost your site's performance rate and user engagement whereas a slow mobile site can drastically affect rankings and user retention. According to studies it is found that a faster websites can lead to higher conversion rates. It has been evident that as faster your website performs, you will be likely to engage more audiences leading to increased sales and revenue.

How Does Page Speed Impact SEO?

When a user goes to a site that takes more than a couple seconds (if that) to load, it is usual for them to become frustrated and there is a high chance they will leave that particular page. Over the past few years, Google has adjusted its algorithm so that it can improve an overall user experience UX thereby checking the site's bounce rate into account. Although it is a fact that Page speed affects your SEO a lot. Therefore, on having a quick and responsive website you can improve the user experience rate significantly. If you are aiming to improve your site's UX rate and reduce the chances of its bouncing, it is important to understand the most probable reasons for the occurrence of bouncing. Here are some of the major reasons that leads to poor user experience and increased bounce rate.

• When your page loading takes more than longer time that left the user feel frustrated
• If your site remains unusable and its features were broken
• If your site lacks proper information and content
• If your site contains erroneous and irrelevant content
• When your site's layout fails in finding answers to the users query

Top 10 Ways to Improve Page Speed

Optimizing your website's page speed is a crucial step these days in order to provide a better user experience and engagement. The entire process of page optimization requires a steady balance that needs to get properly channelized between speed and utility and aesthetics. Here are few recommendations on what you can do to help drop your page load times and get that page speed SEO boost you're looking for.

1. Minifying resources:

One of the easiest ways to reduce page load is to minify all the code that you can. Many WordPress themes and plugins (including Divi) offer this feature out of the box. Divi does it automatically, and other performance optimization plugins such as WP Rocket have toggles for you to opt into the feature.

2. Image optimization by compressing:

Images are the ultimate tool that can make your website content more engaging. One of the major reasons for your site's reduced page speed and higher loading time is JavaScript hogging your server threads, gigantic images (or gigantic numbers of images). In order to keep that from bogging down your site, it is recommended to add an image optimization plugin with an image optimization service such as Imagify or TinyPNG that can lower the file sizes down by well over half.

There are different and advanced image formats having distinct advantages that can be helpful for your website page optimization.

• JPEG is ideal for photographs where color variety is crucial.
• PNG is good for images that require clarity and sharper lines.
• New formats like WebP and progressive JPEG offer faster load times, higher quality, and smaller file sizes.
• Try to use CSS sprites for optimizing small images that are frequently used across your site, like icons, and consider using CSS image sprites. This technique enables you to combine multiple images into a single file, reducing the number of HTTP requests.
• Use the-Fold (ATF) content for faster-perceived load times, load images that appear above the fold first. Pair your ATF with lazy loading to load images.
• Lastly incorporate descriptive alt text and image titles for improving search engine optimization (SEO) and accessibility.

3. Using a Content delivery network CDN:

A content delivery network is a surefire way to increase your page speed. Many hosts these days will offer free versions of different CDNs, including Cloudflare. Instead of just reaching your one specific server, CDN take the content from your site, distribute it across their network of servers placed in strategic locations, and then relay it to the users in the most efficient way possible. This step helps in reducing the chance of occurrence of redundancy and caching thereby improving your uptime and quicker speeds.

4. Use a high quality hosting service

A potential hosting plan is crucial for your website's better performance and elevating its page speed. A slow host can affect user experience and negatively impact your website's performance by causing it to load slowly. If you are looking for speed-centric web hosting services get your hands on a high quality hosting service, focusing on maximum performance, and suitable for both beginners and advanced users. A potential hosting plan can effectively lead content management systems like WordPress, ensuring faster loading times thereby transferring limitless data that can accommodate high web traffic volumes. On the other hand it you are looking forward to improve your Core Web Vitals, hosting service can be of potential help by assessing the website's performance and providing suggestions to improve website speed. These metrics include Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and Interaction to Next Paint (INP). With the use of hosting service you can minimize your page load time by up to 10% and page size by nearly 50% on average.

5. Remove Render-blocking Resources

As your page loads, the browser will constantly try to render and parse multiple elements. Render-blocking resources are those which stop that concurrent loading and take up the browser's attention in full. If you're a WordPress user, many site caching plugins have simple toggles to remove/defer render-blocking resources. You just need to remove those render-blocking elements or defer them to after the primary content has already loaded. By doing so, you can increase page speed and effectively boost your SEO.

6. Optimize your Code

Code optimization is an integral part of website speed optimization as it directly affects how efficiently a website loads and renders. By minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML you can eliminate unnecessary space and make your website's code is clean. A well-organized code  can dramatically enhance website performance by minimizing the number of HTTP requests, which is vital for quick loading. An optimized code helps search engines crawl your site more efficiently, making it easier to lower bounce rates. To achieve this, you can use minification tools that remove unnecessary characters, like spaces and comments, without affecting the code's functionality. For example, Uglify is an excellent tool for minifying JavaScript files, making them lighter and quicker to load.

7. Minimize HTTP requests

The HTTP requests made to the server significantly impacts your website's speed as each request requires time to establish a connection, when your browser asks for resources like images, stylesheets, or scripts. It is recommended that instead of using multiple CSS files, you can merge them into one. If you want to minimize script, you can keep your JavaScript and jQuery code concise and load them asynchronously by adding the async or deferring attributes to the script tags if immediate rendering is unnecessary. Therefore by minimizing HTTP requests, you are actually able to decrease server load and improve overall user experience, which is crucial for SEO and engagement.

8. Enable GZIP Compression

If you are trying to boost your website's performance significantly, it is necessary to reduce the amount of transferred data between your website's server and the client's browser, with the help of GZIP compression. This technique compresses your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files into a ZIP file with a .gz extension, which is significantly smaller in size.

 GZIP offers quick compression thereby reducing your file sizes by up to 90%. It is highly recommended for being lightweight, requiring minimal computational power and temporary storage.

9. Minimize external resources

If you are aiming to increase your web page load time significantly, you need to take an account on your external resources such as social media widgets, chatbots, and analytics tools. For an instance, external resources that are utilized for enhancing your website's functionality and visual appeal can also lead to hinder its performance with a sluggish load time and a poor user experience. Therefore it is recommended for you to regularly review all third-party scripts, plugins, and other resources to ensure they are essential for your site's functionality or user experience. Remove or replace any that are unnecessary or outdated.

10. Utilizing Accelerated Mobile Pages( AMP)

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source HTML framework designed by Google to elevate website performance across mobile devices. This potential framework leverages the strategy of streamlining HTML, CSS, and JavaScript elements, for a smooth browsing experience of the mobile internet users. AMP strategy is one of the most crucial speed optimization strategies to keep mobile users engaged and reduce bounce rates. Some of the major benefits one can harness with the implementation of AMP are,

• Ranking higher in search engines, as Google Search prioritizes faster-loading pages.
• Increased visibility and exposure by appearing on Google Top Stories, making it visible to more mobile users.
• Reduce your bandwidth costs as these AMP pages are smaller and more efficient.
• Minimize your page load time, ensuring a consistent user experience and better customer satisfaction.

Dev Bhushan

Digital Marketing Specialist at SEMReseller

• All

26 Nov 2024