The importance of Page speed in SEO can be understood by the fact, that, it is one of the SEO Ranking Factors.
When your page takes more time to load, the user loses interest thus resulting in a bad user experience.
Page speed has a very significant effect on user experience. When a page loads faster, it shows content quickly. And quick loading is considered a good user experience factor.
Better user experience = Better user retention. People often spend their time on web pages that load faster and if the Content fulfills their needs they keep coming back to look for an answer to their questions.
Today we are going to understand the importance of page speed in SEO.
Table of Contents
- What is a Page Speed?
- What are the Different common ways to measure page speed?
- Why Page speed in SEO is important?
- How to do a page speed test of your website?
- How to improve Page speed for ranking higher on SERPs?
- Conclusion
What is a Page Speed?
The amount of time a webpage takes to load when opened by a user is Page speed. A fast webpage provides a better on-page user experience.
Page speed in SEO is important for one more reason and that is if a page takes more than 3-4 seconds it’s likely that users are going to click on different search results.
A webpage contains so many elements like videos, images, GIFs, and so on, thus affecting the page speed. Even elements like HTML, CSS and other coding languages also affect the page speed.
Both Desktop and Mobile Page speed is measured separately. This is because both technologies are different and page speed on mobile is more important than on Desktop.
Why I said mobile page speed is more important than desktop, is because today more than 50% of searches are conducted through Mobile.
Page speed vs Site speed
There is a difference between site speed and page speed. Site speed is about a Website and Page speed is about a particular webpage. Both have a different purpose although they both are considered important SEO factors.
What are the Different common ways to measure page speed?
Different and common three ways to measure page speeds are
- Time to First Byte (TTFB)
- Fully Loaded Page
- First Contextual Paint
Time to First Byte: This metric assesses how long until a page begins the loading process.
Fully loaded page: It is the time taken by a webpage to fully open. And it is a straightforward way to measure the page speed of a page.
First Contextual Paint: The amount of time it takes to load resources available on the webpage for a user to read.
It is important because if the FCP time is low then a user can at least read what’s written on the page and can interact with it.
Why Page speed in SEO is important?
Page speed in SEO (search engine optimization) is important because in 2010 google announced that page speed would be a ranking factor.
If you want to rank on top of the SERPs, page speed matters. Top results have fast page load time than the pages ranking on the second or third page in SERPs.
Fast page speed also reduces the chances of higher bounce rates and increases the chances of conversions and user engagement.
As you know for google user comes first and if a user felt uneasy with your site then it can be a very negative impression on google.
Google is also working on AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) so that pages load quickly on mobile devices.
How to do a page speed test of your website?
To understand better about your webpage Performance you have to conduct a Page speed test. Page speed tests are easy to perform you don’t have to worry about any complicated things.
You can Use the Best SEO tools for beginners or Run the lighthouse test. You can also get accurate detail of your Page from Google page speed insights.
To run the Lighthouse test– Open your webpage right-click on that page a dialogue box will appear, then click on inspect.
After that look for the lighthouse and click on it
And then click on the page load analyze button on the right-hand side.
Now it will Generate the whole report after analyzing your page.
Page speed insight– This tool is easy to use. You need to paste your web URL into page insight and click analyze. And bingo you will get all the details related to your page.
One important thing to keep in mind is that mobile and desktop page load time is different, so you have to notice both the devices’ scores.
How to improve Page speed for ranking higher on SERPs?
To improve page speed for ranking higher on SERPs, you need to understand the basic elements of a webpage.
You can enhance the page speed of a webpage by improving some of the elements Like images, videos, GIFs, HTML, and CSS of a webpage.
When you will do a page speed test you will know which area needs more attention. It will save your time and you will be having a clear idea of things to take care of, on your webpage.
Here are some of the best ways to improve page load time for SEO to rank higher on SERPs
Optimizing Websites code– Codes are vital to a website’s performance. If there are any unnecessary characters, commas, and other unimportant things then Remove them, for better load time.
Compress images– It is very important to maintain a balance between image size and image quality. Higher the image size longer the time. So to avoid that compress your images without losing their quality.
Compression tools– Sometimes user’s network connection is low and is unable to open a page. when you use compression tools they automatically reduce file sizes to load quicker.
Conclusion
If you have a website, whether it’s product-based, service-based, affiliate-based, or anything. It’s important to optimize the page speed. It will help in gaining more organic visitors and less bounce rates. Page speed in SEO is a part of Technical SEO. This topic may sound complicated at first but when you will understand the concept it will become easy for you.