Why Website Speed is Critical for SEO and User Experience
There is nothing as frustrating as visiting a website, let’s say an ecommerce website, to get a product you want to purchase, and the page just keeps loading… and loading… and loading. The loading takes forever and you just hit the back button and move to another website with a faster loading speed. Sound familiar? This scenario plays out thousands of times every day, and if your website speed isn’t optimized, you could be losing traffic, customers, and revenue without even realizing it.
What is Website Speed?
Website speed simply refers to how fast a web page loads each time a visitor visits the website. The metrics used in measuring the speed of a website include page load time, time to first byte (TTFB), and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Using these metrics to measure your website speed, you can understand how long it takes for your website to completely load and display its content to users.
When a visitor comes to a fast-loading website, they can easily access the content of the site. But on a slow-loading website, due to the delay in the site loading, visitors are more likely to leave the website before it fully loads. As a website owner, you can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix to analyse your website’s performance, measure and get recommendations on how you can improve your website speed.
Why is Page Speed/Site Speed Important?
The page speed of a website is very important especially if you are looking to give visitors a unique user experience and rank for SEO. Here’s why:
- User Experience: A fast-loading website increases the user experience of your website, reduces the chances of visitors leaving your website, and leads to lower bounce rates and higher engagement. A lot of people don’t have the patience to wait for a website to load for hours and are already out of the website if it takes more than three seconds to load. So, as a website owner, to reduce frustrated users and site abandonment, you should improve your website speed.
- SEO Rankings: You may not know this but your page load speed impacts the SEO ranking of your website. Between a slow loading website and fast loading website, Google is most likely to prioritise a fast loading website. If you are using a slow website, you may find it difficult to rank high in search results, affecting your visibility and organic traffic. Google’s Core Web Vitals, including LCP, FID, and CLS, emphasize speed and page performance as crucial for rankings.
- Mobile Experience: Today, with Google indexing focused on how your website performs on mobile devices, you have to ensure that your website speed is optimised to load fast on smartphones and tablets. A slow mobile experience may affect your indexing and hurt your rankings.
Impact on Bounce Rates and Rankings
Bounce rate is simply the rate at which visitors leave a website after viewing just one page on the site. A website with high bounce rates often has poor user experience, and a key result of these may be the website load speed.
According to research by Think with Google, the research revealed that as the page load time of a website goes from 1 second to 5 seconds, there is a 90% increase in the probability of a bounce. This shows why improving website speed should be paramount if you want to achieve better engagement on your website.
Key Insights:
- Websites with faster load speed usually have longer session durations compared to slower websites.
- If your website has a low bounce rate, it sends a signal to search engines that your website provides value.
- Improved website speed boosts the ranking of your site on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Tools to Check Speed
Before you get started and improve website speed, you should first analyse the current performance of your website. Here are some reliable tools you can use:
- Google PageSpeed Insights: Using this tool, you can easily analyze the mobile and desktop load speed of your website and get specific recommendations on how you can improve it.
- GTmetrix: Use GTmetrix to obtain detailed performance reports of your website, including insights into load behavior and how you can optimize it.
- Pingdom: With this tool, you can measure your website load speed and performance across different locations in the world. It also allows you to monitor your website’s uptime and downtime.
- WebPageTest: It offers you advanced site speed testing functionalities, allowing you to customize different testing options and get detailed metrics.
- Lighthouse: If you are a Chrome user, you should find this builtin feature in the inspect site section. Using Lighthouse, you can run site audits on the performance and accessibility of your website.
Easy Fixes for Better Performance
Improving website speed doesn’t have to be complex. Here are actionable steps:
- Optimize Images: One of the causes of a slow website is large image files. Using a tool like TinyPNG, you compress images, reducing the file size without losing quality. Consider using modern image formats like WebP for faster loading.
- Minify CSS and JavaScript: Minify is a free tool you can use to reduce your code size and improve the load time of your website. If you are using a WordPress website, there are several plugins on WordPress that you can use for minifying the CSS and JavaScript of your site.
- Enable Browser Caching: To improve website speed, you should enable caching to store website resources for repeat visitors of your website. This will reduce the time they have to wait for all your website resources to load, improving performance.
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): Speed up content delivery of your website by utilising CDNs. One popular CDN is Cloudflare, used by a lot of website owners across the world. They increase the speed at which your website content is distributed by distributing them across multiple servers worldwide. However, setting up Cloudflare may be a bit technical and you may need assistance from a web developer to set it up.
- Upgrade Hosting: Sometimes the reason for your slow website speed may be your website hosting. Reach out to your hosting provider and check if the server resources allocated to your website are sufficient to meet the demands of your website traffic. If it isn’t, you should consider upgrading your hosting to a plan that provides you enough server resources.
- Reduce Redirects: So many redirects on your website can impact your website load speed negatively, slowing it down. If you have a lot of unnecessary redirects on your website, minimize them as they will only redirect your visitors to the back button and result in them leaving your site.
- Implement Lazy Loading: To improve website speed and reduce the initial load times, you should have lazy loading implemented on your website. These will make images and videos to load only when they come into view of the users. For WordPress website owners, you can find lazy loading plugins in the WordPress plugin directory that you can download and implement on your website.
- Clean Up Plugins: While you are downloading and uploading new plugins on your WordPress website, don’t forget to disable and remove outdated and unnecessary plugins. Unless your website is a museum, there’s no reason you should be holding onto outdated plugins that you aren’t using as it will only slow down your WordPress website.
- Optimize Fonts: You don’t need all the fonts in the world to give your website a beautiful look, so you should limit the number of web fonts you use on your website. Just two or three fonts are enough for any website. You should also consider hosting them locally to improve the loading speed.
- Enable Gzip Compression: Use Gzip to compress your website files to reduce the size of the CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, improving the page speed of your website.
Conclusion
The importance of a fast website cannot be overstated, as it basically impacts both the user experience and search rankings of your website. By taking the outlined steps to improve website speed, you can reduce bounce rates, boost SEO rankings, and enhance customer satisfaction.
However, don’t forget that website speed optimization is a continuous process that never ends as long as you have a website. So to keep your website at peak performance and stay ahead of the competition, test your site’s performance regularly.
Request a free speed audit for your site today and unlock your website’s full potential!
