Why is page speed important for your website?

Page speed is a ranking factor that has been growing in importance for a couple of years now. What’s more, each year, its importance to your site’s SERP positions is only growing. What was just another metric to show how quickly a person can view content, has turned into an ever-important metric that indicates a website’s overall user experience.

Page speed is important for many reasons. Firstly, if you want to convert your traffic, you need to have a fast page load time so that your audience doesn’t get frustrated and bounce off. Secondly, Google will rank a faster website over your competitors because its ranking algorithm now puts more emphasis on page speed. One reason for that is Google doesn’t want to deliver results that are slow loading as this will put their users off also. They want to present the most relevant, up to date and appropriate websites with their results.

What actually is page speed defined as?

Page speed is the time it takes for all the content on your website’s page to load. This can be affected by your website’s code, such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, Images, and PDFs. It’s important to have clean code and to merge CSS and other code where necessary so your website loads quickly.

Why is page speed now a priority?

Have you ever wondered why people click off of websites and apps so quickly? The main reason is because of page speed. Studies have shown that we as humans are impatient when it comes to waiting for pages to load and waiting more than a few seconds, we generally become frustrated and click away. This is where your competitors can step in and win your business simply because their pages load faster than yours. So, what can you do to change this?

Optimising your website’s page speed is important if you want a higher search ranking on Google. Google has its own PageSpeed Insights tool to test how fast your website loads for users and provides recommendations for improvements. GT Metrix is another popular page speed testing tool, but you should always check your results against Google’s own recommendations to ensure you’re making the changes that will actually improve your ranking.

You can view Googles own video on this subject matter below!

But what are some of the factors that cause a slow website?

If your images are heavy and not properly resized, this will slow down your website’s loading speed. You can cut out descriptions and other assets, and if you’re using WordPress, there are plugins like Smush and Short Pixel that can help with optimising your images.

Make sure to compress your files, code and merge CSS and JavaScript files – this will help your browser load web pages much more quickly. If you have any unused code, get rid of it as it will only slow the load time down further. Rendering too many JavaScript files will also make your page load slowly, so make sure to merge them where possible and get rid of any unused code here too. In general, if you have too many large files on a page it will slow your page down.

What factors help page loads?

In order to optimise our page speed for both desktop and mobile users, we need to take a look at the two different markets and what each one needs. For example, with mobile users, we can use Accelerated Mobile Pages to help with page speed, or we can build independently to display fewer elements on mobile than on desktop. This way, we can give our audience a streamlined version of our desktop offering. We can get to the point more and strip out heavy video files to ensure a better mobile experience.

Your desktop version is still important as users will still be visiting from a desktop, laptop, or other device. To keep your website running quickly on all devices, make sure to merge files, reduce image sizes, ensure your server can handle the files, and use a CDN where necessary. This will help your website load quickly and efficiently for all users.

Get your website in the green like ours!

To sum it up, using the points above will help your audience engage better with your website, help convert website traffic and improve your ranking in Google. Therefore, it is critical to ensure that your page load speed is good for your online success.

If you need help getting your website in the green, we can help with optimisation and other websites needs. Get in touch today for an informal chat to see how can help your business succeed online.