When browsing different websites, if a page takes forever to load, you’d want to leave the website, right? It is not only annoying but also wastes your time. You would rather get your information or purchase through a website that is easy and faster to navigate. This is not just our assumption. According to a recent report, about 83% of internet users expect a website’s loading speed to be 3 seconds or even less than that. So, in other words, most of your users will abandon your website if your landing pages are slower than three seconds of load time. In fact, the bounce rate increases dramatically from a mere 9% for a 1-2-second loading speed to up to 38% for a five-second load speed.
A website with a slow loading speed isn’t just detrimental to your business. It doesn’t even let your website show up on the first page of a Google search. In reality, the websites that Google allows to appear on its first page take an average of 1.65 seconds to load. So, if your website or any of your pages take longer than that to load, you won’t likely secure a good search engine ranking at all. Google and other search engines prefer faster websites because it improves the user experience. So, if you boost SEO ranking with a faster page speed, you are not only keeping your visitors happy but also increasing your search engine rankings.
Why Website Speed Matters for Search Engine Optimization
The website’s loading speed is one of the most important factors in SEO. That is because search engines like Google and Bing want to give their users the best online browsing experience possible. If your website is slow, Google can detect that, and it will not let your website rank as high as you want. In fact, loading speed is one of the twenty most important Google ranking factors. Studies also show that your bounce rate increases up to 32% if your website loading speed goes from 1 second to only 3 seconds. Not only that, but a delay of even one second can lower your conversion rates by up to 7%. It can not only lead to more people leaving your website but also discourage them from even trying to come back to your page. These factors collectively push your rankings down, reducing organic traffic and potential leads.
So, search engine optimization is not only for improving your website’s speed and having a perfect load speed, but it also gives your user a better and smoother experience. With a faster website, your users would want to stay longer, browse more pages, and even would want to buy your products and services. So, it pulls your rankings up, increases organic traffic, and gets you better leads. Your website visitors and target audience are also more likely to engage and sign up for your platform if they enjoy their time on your website. Faster websites can also handle a lot of traffic and won’t crash. Therefore, with an improved user experience, search engines can detect that your website is valuable to users. It not only helps you boost your SEO rankings with page speed but also helps your website outperform your competitors.
Tools to Check Your Website Speed
Before you can plan to optimize your website’s speed, you should audit and assess the current performance. Many tools can help you measure that, such as Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. These tools can provide you with detailed insights and reports about your website speed. They also help you evaluate different factors of a website’s speed such as server response time, image sizes, and efficiency of the code. These insights also always include actionable suggestions. These suggestions can help you easily make a plan to fix any problems with the loading speed of the website’s pages or multimedia.
For example, Google PageSpeed Insights scores your website out of 100. It highlights features like Website Speed Optimization and code minification. A score above 90 is ideal because it shows that your website is performing well. However, any number below 90 is a sign to optimize the areas for improvement. You can also check the mobile responsiveness, showing you whether your website is optimized for both large and small screens. This is extremely vital for your website’s survival because nowadays, many users are opening your site on a phone instead of a laptop or a PC. So, using these tools is beneficial as they not only analyze your website’s performance but also record any improvements over time. With these detailed reports, you can be sure that your optimization strategies actually work and that you are using the right software and technologies.
Easy Fixes to Speed Up Your Website
One of the most effective ways to optimize site performance is through image compression. About 50% of users prefer to skip out on images or any other multimedia if loading takes a long time. High-resolution photos are definitely more attractive and appealing, but they can slow down your website to a huge margin. When images are too large, it takes a long time to load, especially on a mobile phone. Image compression is not at all synonymous with bad quality. In fact, you can use tools like TinyPNG or WebP that can decrease the size of your images without any compromise on their quality.
Another easy fix is to minimize HTTP requests. Every element on your website, i.e., photos, written content, and stylesheets, needs a separate request from the server. If there are a lot of requests, your websites will become much slower. So, by combining multiple CSS files or JavaScript scripts into one, you can successfully decrease the number of requests. Hence, it will lead to a higher loading and can actually improve it to several seconds.
Enabling caching is another easy technique that ensures fast website loading for SEO. Caching works by storing the features of your website on the user’s device. So, if they leave the website and want to visit again, the site does not need to load everything from the start. This is especially useful if you have blogs or an e-commerce business with repeat customers. Caching stores elements of your site on users’ devices so that when they return, the site doesn’t need to load everything from scratch. So, if they leave an item in their cart and come back later to check out, their cart won’t be empty. It will be easier for them to check out, and you can make your sale.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A content delivery network (CDN) is also very effective in sharing your website’s content across many servers all over the world. With this setup, your user can access your website from the nearest server, which significantly decreases the load time. For example, if you are visiting a website in the US that has a primary server in China, chances are that without a CDN, the website can be painfully slow to navigate. However, with a CDN, your request is redirected to the nearest local server, and due to that, you can enjoy a faster loading speed.
Therefore, using the content delivery network is essential for businesses that are international or want to go global. These can be any websites such as e-commerce websites, artists’ digital portfolios, educational or entertaining content, etc. It helps maintain Website Speed Optimization no matter where users are located. For example, Cloudflare is a very popular CDN, and it can improve your website’s loading speed by a big margin. Similarly, Akamai is another popular CDN that works in 100+ different regions all over the world. These CDNs also help your website manage sudden surges in your website’s traffic so that your website works smoothly for your users. Inadvertently, this step also optimizes SEO by improving user engagement.
Optimizing Code and Files
Optimizing your website’s code is another basic step in improving speed. Code Minification is a strategy that removes unnecessary spaces and characters from CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files. It can reduce their size to such an extent that it makes them faster to load. Smaller files mean faster processing times, which gives your user a much better overall website experience. Not only that, but this strategy also makes sure that your website is compatible with caching in browsers.
Postponing JavaScript is another important strategy. By loading JavaScript files only after the main content has loaded, you allow users to interact with your website faster. It greatly improves perceived load time. Users can see the most important elements quickly, which makes the website seem more responsive and engaging. This strategy is especially beneficial for mobile users and people with slower internet connections.
Additionally, reducing page load time through code optimization directly affects your SEO. Clean and efficient code minimizes errors and improves compatibility across different browsers and devices. The cleaner your code, the better your website’s chance of delivering a faster, smoother, and more consistent experience.
Choosing the Right Hosting Plan
Selecting the right hosting plan is a foundational step for improving site speed. The most affordable plans that you can find can be shared hosting plans. But, these plans are more likely to perform badly. That is because many websites share the same hosting platform and the same resources that the platform offers to every website. This can especially lead to lower load times in peak hours, which are very important for both new and established businesses. That is why investing in a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or cloud-based hosting makes sure that your website has its own dedicated resources that provide faster response times and better reliability.
If you are expecting high website traffic or want to scale, cloud hosting can help you a lot. Your website is shared among different servers, which decreases the potential risk of crashing or downtime. Choosing a hosting service that supports modern technologies like HTTP/2 can further improve website performance. HTTP/2 allows multiple file requests at the same time, which speeds up loading times. So, choosing a reliable and reputed hosting service can positively boost SEO ranking with improved page speed. A well-supported website is not prone to any slowdown or crashes and gives your users the best UX possible.
Advanced Strategies: Lazy Loading and Prefetching
Lazy loading is an advanced technique that optimizes website performance by loading images and videos only when they are coming into the user’s view. This prevents the site from being cluttered and slowed down by loading all media at once. This method is especially great for websites that feature high-quality images. For example, if you are a photographer, your digital portfolio on your website should only have very high-quality photos and videos. Similarly, if you are a painter, an artist, a chef, or even an e-commerce store owner, you should be able to clearly display your products and services with very good multimedia. So, if you utilize lazy loading, your website can reduce its initial loading time, which makes the website feel faster. Therefore, it helps you improve technical SEO for your website’s load speed.
Now, let’s come to it. Prefetching allows your website to load assets in the background because it can predict what a user can click on next. For example, if a user is on your home page, prefetching can load the assets for pages that that user mostly visits. It recognizes and remembers the user’s previous browsing pattern and history. The page appears almost instantly when the user clicks, creating an even better user experience. These advanced strategies not only enhance the website’s performance but also boost engagement by making your website feel faster and way more responsive.
Keeping Your Website Fast by Regular Maintenance
Improving the speed of your website and optimizing the search engine optimization is more than just a one-and-done task. Instead, keeping your website completely optimized needs regular maintenance. You can regularly check your website’s performance so that you can fix any potential problems before they arise. Content management systems like WordPress often release updates that improve performance and fix bugs. For example, if you add new plugins or content, it is important to make sure of its impact on your website’s speed. Some plugins can be incompatible with your website’s server or speed, so you need to keep optimizing its SEO as you update.
Website speed optimization also prevents minor issues from becoming major problems. For example, updating your website’s software, such as your CMS, makes it more compatible with the latest speed optimizations and security features. By properly and continuously maintaining your website, you ensure that it does not lose its ranking on search engines and stays on top of your competitors’ websites.
Monitor and Test Regularly
You should make it a habit to run speed tests at least once a month or every time you add or remove any code or plugin from your website. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix are the most recommended by our SEO experts and website developers. You can quickly check for any issues and even get suggestions to improve your website’s speed directly from the source that ranks your website,i.e., Google.
You should also take into account user satisfaction metrics and take their feedback seriously. If your visitors are leaving the website instantly and you get a higher bounce rate than usual, it shows that there is a problem with your website. Lower conversion rates and a repeat visitor not going through with their purchase are also red flags. It shows that you need to further optimize your website for faster loading and SEO. You can also test many optimization strategies and newer techniques to ensure it works in your favor. That is how you will be able to keep your high search engine ranking but also potentially improve it with consistency.
Conclusion
Keeping your audience engaged and interested directly relates to how well your website is performing, with loading speed one of the most important factors. About 2/3rd of users prefer leaving the website and searching for a similar one if they need a better user experience. Also, about 44% of online users share their negative experiences on a website with other users.
Simple steps like compressing photos, enabling caching, and using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can make a big positive difference. These small changes not only improve user experience but also tell search engines that your website is optimized so that it can rank higher. Remember that improving speed is an ongoing process. Regularly check your website’s performance and fix problems as needed. By focusing on website speed optimization, you will statistically get a better conversion rate and, therefore, a much better return on investment.
At bmymarketer, our SEO experts and website developers collaborate to create a website that is not only optimized for loading speed but also secures a better ranking on search engines. Our teams make sure to create a customized plan based on evidence and your website’s performance metrics. We start with a professional and thorough website analysis and compare it with the latest industry practices and updates. After delivering the website, we will also keep a check on it to ensure that you get the newest algorithm and software updates faster than your competitors. We don’t consider you just a client but a partner in growth and success. That is why we measure your success as our success. Whether you want to build a website from scratch or optimize an existing one, contact us to book a consultation and a free demonstration.
