Many online marketers struggle with search engine rankings and try many hard things to solve the problem. For instance, there are organic link building, page design, etc. However, one thing most tend to ignore is page speed.
Page speed is a crucial factor that affects how users engage with a site. For instance, it affects how long they stay, how many become paying clients, and where you rank on organic search.
Sadly, many sites perform very poorly regarding this metric, which badly affects their conversion. Therefore, you must improve your page speed if you are in this boat. That is what we will be talking about here, so let’s get right into it.
What Is Page Speed?
In simple terms, page speed is how long a browser loads a webpage fully. This metric is affected by many factors, such as the HTML code, CSS used to style page elements, different JavaScript files, photos, videos, etc. Even the size of page elements (measured in kilobytes) or the web server’s speed can impact both.
Nevertheless, it’s one of the main things that affect SEO ranking. Along with quality link building, design, and content richness, it’s one of the main ways to improve SEO and user experience.
So, what does good page speed look like? Research shows that any site should strive for 2-3 seconds. Beyond that, users slowly lose attention. So, 0.1 seconds is the golden standard and comes across as an instant response, though seamless speed is 1 second, and that’s the speed of the best sites.
What Is Page Speed Optimization?
Page speed optimization is a set of ways to improve the average loading time of web pages on a site. It centers mostly on cutting back on things that will slow down page loading. This would seem pretty easy, but these tasks tend to be complex. This is why most people get their page speed optimization services from firms specializing in it.
These operators tend to be skilled in various SEO-related services, such as backlinking services, design optimization, and page speed optimization. Especially where page speed is concerned, they can find the right balance between components and make additions and removals to improve page speeds.
But what exactly do these people work on? The factors affecting speed which these firms take care of include:
Heavy Images
Heavy image formats like Gif, PNG, JPEG, etc., weigh a lot on a webpage. Sadly, these formats make up a large percentage of internet image traffic. Improving page speed means cutting back on the use of formats like this.
Page Widgets and Fancy Effects
We all know page effects and widgets make websites look pleasing to users. But no surprise, they take up a lot of space and slow down loading.
Lack of Content Delivery Networks
If your site doesn’t have a CDN, it will take longer for users to load pages when they are far from the server. Since they impact all HTTP requests to the server, these latencies become apparent.
Why Is Page Speed Optimization Crucial
Now, obviously, you want your users to have a good experience with your website. Otherwise, why would they ever come back, right? So, how exactly does the speed of your page affect user experience?
It Can Make or Break Brand Perception
How a user feels about your firm and the service you offer is affected by their experience. In fact, it’s part of said experience.
For instance, YSL makes you feel special, and wearing Adidas makes you feel strong and modern. We call that brand psychology.
The experiences your users have with your brand’s products will depend on the values you assign to them. So, how does this relate to speed, you might ask?
Well, how fast your pages load also affects how the user sees your brand. For instance, we know that users don’t think well of brands with slow-loading pages. No one wants to buy stuff from e-commerce sites that freeze, crash, or take a billion years to load. Due to the slow loading experience, users may conclude that the site is run by slackers who don’t care about making things great for users.
What does this tell you? The basic idea is that this isn’t true for users’ buying habits. It is also true for their general view of your business, even if they buy one time. If your pages are not fast, you risk looking unserious and unprofessional. After all, what professional would run a sloppy website that takes forever to load?
It Affects Retention
A slow website repels visitors if it takes too long to load. In fact, even search engines will be turned off.
To show this, three different domain names were looked at in one study, each with its site speed:
- The page loaded in 0.8 seconds ranked first among those with the exact main keywords.
- The pages that did between 2.3 to 2.6 seconds ranked lower than 50.
What does this study show? First, it shows that even a slight delay in load times affects how well your site ranks. This even factored in the use of main keywords.
Users got bored by slow load times, which meant a bad user experience and eventually caused conversion rates to drop. This is why Google is biased towards pages that load fast since they offer a better user experience.
It doesn’t matter if your page has the best subject info and you’ve done much keyword improvement or even backlinks buying to boost search engine performance. Google will move it lower on the search engine result pages if it takes too long to load.
How Do You Improve Page Speed, Then?
So, now we know how page speed affects user experience, it’s clear that improving page speed should be your goal.
As we’ve seen, people tend to outsource link building, page speed optimization, and other SE rank improvement work to experts. But here are a few things you might be able to do to improve things yourself.
Use a CDN
As we’ve seen, not having a content delivery network (CDN) is one of the causes of low loading speed. A CDN is a system of computers holding copies of data dispersed around a network.
Such systems help to max up bandwidth for access to the data from clients throughout the network. If your site has much content to display, then one of these will greatly help your speed.
Content delivery networks work by bringing pages based on the user’s location. As a result, they can access a server close to them more quickly, which speeds up the website’s loading time.
Try GZip Compression
Large pages with a lot of content tend to download slowly. Compressing all the large content into a zip file is one method for making such pages load faster.
By lowering the page’s bandwidth, compression makes it simpler for a user’s browser to load them. You may speed up page loading by compressing the files on your website using tools like Gzip. The file will then be unzipped and displayed by the user’s browser.
Mind Image Size and Defer Offscreen Images
Images can be ill-suited for a site, depending on their size and dimensions. If you want your site to load fast, then ensure you only use properly sized images. Or, at the very least, add images that adapt to the kind of device the page is loading on.
In addition, you should also try loading offscreen images only when other crucial elements have loaded.
Preload Any Files Used by All Site Pages
On many sites, there tend to be files you will see on every single page. Files like this are a great place to start improving your page speed.
In addition, you can avoid the server having to send a separate request for the same files each time. How? By delivering those files along with the main page, which is the HTML file.
As long as the preloaded file is light, this will have minimal impact on the initial package’s weight. However, it will ensure that the process of loading a web page will go along a lot faster and smoother.
Compress the Pictures
Compressing pictures is one method for boosting site and page speed. This method helps to slash the amount of data that a server must send.
You obviously can’t throw out every picture on your site. You can instead use a program to optimize pictures without cutting visual quality. For instance, you can use GIFs or PNGs rather than JPGs for web graphics.
Compressing pictures gives your users a better experience by speeding up downloads, using less bandwidth, and taking up less storage space.
Try A Dedicated Server
Moving to a dedicated server that’s faster or just making one is one great way to do the trick as well. Even though this move may cost quite a bit, it is always better than staying on a slow server. Again, this is because a slow server will cost you more in sales over time.
Final Thoughts
For the best user experience, website speed is crucial—every kilobyte matters regarding page speed optimization. In fact, the speed of your site could make the difference between your online company making money and not!
The topline income of your company may suffer if you neglect to optimize the loading time of your website. But, of course, these methods we’ve talked about should not be used in isolation. For example, while switching to a faster server, you should also do something about image sizes and CDNs.
It may be costly to do, but joining as many of these measures as you can yield good results in the long term. In the end, you will be glad you invested so much in optimizing your page speed.
