How Does Page Speed Affect SEO And How To Improve It?

In the digital marketing arena, page speed is the most efficient and fundamental part of Search Engine Optimization.

Page Speed = Increased Traffic = Sales

The page speed for your business website means increased traffic as Google counts this as a ranking factor when providing results to a searcher’s query.

If your users can easily explore the content of your website, you have provided your potential customers with enough engagement area, and they can decide to opt for products and services provided by you, leading to sales.

So, in this blog, I am going to discuss about page speed SEO…

But… before that, it is important to understand what page speed is. 

So, let’s get started!!

What Is Page Speed?

As the name suggests page speed is the time taken by your web page to load its content when a searcher puts a query in a search engine.

According to a survey by Unbounce that included 750 customers and 395 marketers, stated about page load speed,

“Nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.”

This statistics notes that your targeted customers online have an impatient nature and have formed an opinion in 0.5 seconds of loading time of your web page.

The image below states about your landing page where only 2% of marketers can achieve the acceptable speed needed by your website to rank on SERPs as per Google.

The statistic shows that good page speed should be under 3 seconds as this is the most acceptable speed of a web page by any Search Engine.

In this blog, the question of how important is page speed SEO is discussed at length here.

But first, let’s understand why page speed is important for your website.

Why Is Page Speed Important?

Page speed is one of the most basic and essential factors of ranking in SERPs that are among 200+ factors and guidelines provided by Google.

But then, why is page speed important and most importantly, how does page speed affect SEO?

The speed with which a reader can have a fully functional Web Page loaded from a given site is referred to as page speed and it is important whether you can provide it to your audience. 

That is, if a poorly-performing website takes a longer time to load the content of the searcher’s query on a web page can turn visitors away. 

In the same way, if your sites load quickly, you would receive more traffic and have higher conversion rates.

Most customers’ behavior on your websites depends on the page speed of the webpage content as they want a website loaded to be under 2 seconds and would abandon a website if it crosses the 3 seconds mark set by the Google algorithm as shown in the statistic below.

Google has promoted the page speed to remain under 3 seconds and as you know page speed is the essential ranking factor, your website must achieve the required performance SEO time, or else, you would never really appear in an online search, resulting in no. of consumers.

Importance Of Page Speed In SEO

The page speed of your web page is an essential element of your Search Engine Optimization techniques due to:

i.  A direct ranking factor for mobile searches (July 2018).

ii. A ranking factor for all pages (Core Web Vitals update of June 2021)

Google algorithm particularly, keeps page speed to be included in the jury section of Core Web Vitals to choose websites online.

The SEO speed and other factors need to be rewarded with a higher ranking when crawling reveals its relevance; penalized with a lower ranking if opposed.

The factors that decide these CWVs include Loading (of a web page), Interactivity (with your website by online traffic), and Visual Stability (of web page content) as shown in the image below.

These vitals start with the loading page speed that, therefore, leads your targeted traffic to interact with your content online, and would depend on the visual stability of media files on that web page.

Also, if your website’s page speed could cause your traffic to bounce, increasing your Bounce Rate, and giving Google crawlers an impression of the irrelevance of your website content concerning searchers’ queries.

Now, the high bounce rate is due to slow page speed, and this keeps your website away from being ranked higher in SERPs and you get less or no traffic on your website, clearing out how important is page speed for SEO.

Reasons For A Slow Webpage Loading

Page Load is a supreme factor in your SEO tally, that is considered both by the searchers and the search engines alike.

It is important to know which factors affect your website to lose traffic and lower your rank on SERPs.

i. Your Images And Other Media Files Are Not Optimized

That means that you are using heavy, high-definition image files which take more bandwidth on your website than necessary.

This causes your web page size to increase and your website to load slowly.

Read More: Everything You Need To Know About Image Optimization

ii. Using Unnecessary Or Incorrectly Implemented Jquery Elements And Excess Flash Data Such As Information, Images, And Animations

Java Scripts or JQuery helps to add active and interactive content to your website similar to Flash content.

And, on a web page, it takes time to load, interpret, and then execute a Javascript file, and loading of media files in Flash data.

This causes the slow loading of your webpage and that is why JavaScript rendering and Flash content implementation is the most common issue of a slow website

iii. Your Webpage Has Too Many HTTPS Requests

Too many HTTP requests can be influenced by a combination of JavaScript, CSS, and picture files. 

So, when your user visits your website, the Search Engine makes multiple requests to load each of these files, slowing down the page load time dramatically.

iv. Your Website Is Using Unnecessary Codes

When unnecessary codes that do not perform any function or execute any particular request, causes your website to deal with

i. Excessive white space

ii. Embedded formats such as coloring, and styling

iii. Vacant new lines, and 

iv. Unnecessary comments

All of these add to the size of the website stylesheet and expand your site unnecessarily causing its slowness.

v. Using Too Many Advertisements On Your Website

Advertising earns revenue but also causes your website to slow down its loading when used in bulk on a single page.

The picture below is an image of Amazon website, which contains too many Ads and hence, took a little more time to load as you can see in the image below: 

vi. Using A Multiple User Hosting Services Makes It Bad For Your Website

If you are using a hosting service that provides SSD space, bandwidth, and RAM data available to multiple website owners, your website could eventually face low site speed.

As any one of these websites gets a surge in traffic to cause the available data to be used by them and there is no room for processing your user’s request.

This increase in traffic on the same hosting station causes your page load speed to decrease and your business loses your traffic.

Now, these are the factors that cause a slow website and therefore, must be taken into consideration for overall SEO.

Therefore, we are going to discuss the SEO best practices that you can apply to your website to reduce your Page Load Speed.

Tips To Improve Your Page Speed SEO

Maintain And Compress HTTP Requests

Images are the most interacted and explainable resources of your content on a web page and therefore, the need to provide the clearest, high-definition (HD) files seems accurate when applying to a web page.

But this is not necessarily true, compression helps your web page store files in less space or on the browser cache and generates a productive output of these when displayed on your website.

Your image could be compressed in GIF, PNG, and JPEG formats as per the requirement of the image as shown in the picture below.

The thing is, image data is a small part of all the data stored in servers and when requested from the servers as requested by online traffic, you get a cached version on your browser first which takes the fastest page speed to load when requested by the searcher.

Now, think that your page is clicked on, and from then on your website makes several requests to the HTTP and access your page’s content through stored data online.

This process of requesting data from hosts to servers and provided to your targeted user’s device takes time slowing down your webpages speed.

This is why, the number of elements on a web page such as Images, CSS Files, and Videos must be minimalized by compressing these into gzip files and cached firstly on the requested browser, later it is shown as the loaded fast on your user’s browser.

Software available to compress your web page files of text compression or media files compressed by Gzip, some of the most used tools is recommended by Google.

Gzip software compresses your files and frees the load on bandwidth, making it easier for your website to load quickly and improving server response time.

Remove ‘No Need’ Data From Resources

Optimizing your data needs to have essential elements stored and removing some unwanted elements such as codes gets your web page to load faster.

The picture shown below presents some repeated and unwanted data in the website by minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML.

The CSS file may contain codes that don’t need to be in expandable form and can be compressed without losing the original element of the website as shown in the picture below:

Another CSS inline example is given below does not necessarily need an h5 paragraph twice which has repeated codes.

For content management of WordPress-made websites, you can add free plugins like the W3 Total Cache tool for minification of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML while for image compression, you can use the WP Smush tool plugin without losing its quality. 

Use CDNs (Content Distribution Networks)

CDNs are networks of servers that store the content of your website at multiple locations that are geographically expanded all over the world so that when a user requests your web page, the browser collects the data from the nearest server.

This helps in faster and more reliable access to your website by your targeted audience. 

Distributing a load of your website’s content throughout the servers across the geographical area is more practical than the traditional way as shown in the picture below.

This way of data fetching distributes the traffic and ensures the availability of the site without increasing the page load time.

Also, it is a protective concept to prevent your website from cyber-attacks.

Optimize Media Files

Images, videos, and even Audio used within a webpage sometimes are larger in size than necessarily needed and of course, this bulk of media files prevents your web pages to be speedily loaded because this takes more HTTP request time.

Optimizing these files needs proper formats such as graphic images using PNG format, a photograph using JPEG format and you can even use CSS sprites to form image templates so that your image is loaded easily with the content, saving you loading time.

Here, creating a code space for the image has enabled your target audience to get the image on your page to load without delay but as written content.

Similar to decreasing the size of a file and compressing it helps you with acceptable page loading speed as shown in the picture below.

Here the compressed file has 4 times the compressed files.

Now similarly, using videos that are small must be compressed which does not reduce their quality but just divide these DPIs into smaller space that is collected when a request is made by online traffic.

This is why page speed is important in your website by conducting media file optimization.

Reducing Redirects

Redirects take your target customers and search engines to a specific URL from the one they requested originally.

So, when you use a single redirect on a webpage, for example,

example.com → www.example.com → m.example.com → m.example.com/home

Usually, the two URL in between happens because the requested page is unavailable or isn’t working, and the crawler has to go around in a loop as shown in the picture below:

Here, the search engine has to process the command of the requested URL but due to its unavailability, it reaches the specific URL (m.example.com/home) that is redirected to the URL 1 that is available.

And If redirect URL 1 is unavailable, redirect URL 2 can be located and presented in its wake. 

Now, the thing is that more than two redirects would create longer paths to reach the available URL causing your web page to load slower.

So, use redirects only when necessary and if you are using them keep a single redirect rather than using a chain of redirects. 

Choose Quality Web Hosting

Many experts guess when it comes to page speed, web hosting is one of the most neglected factors because shared hosting has taken a trend nowadays.

But with the perks of shared hosting, you are losing your online traffic because they get frustrated with your lowered page speed as the resources are used in tandem by each website on the network.

The graph below shows the difference between the page speed of the single network hosting arena to a shared one.

Your page-load speed is slower as you are hosting on the same network as other users and that is why your site performance SEO has been affected and has become dependent on multiple sites that are using up most of the resources on the same network as you.

Quality web hosting may come with a price as it provides available storage, CDN, Quality DNS service, HTTP/2, load-balances overcrowding, and other perks that automatically reduce your page speed and gives your user the time to explore rather than wait.

Keep Heavy Elements To A Limit

Java, Flash, and other bulky media files should either be kept up to a limit or should be removed overall. 

For these files, the Search Engines have to build a DOM tree which is a standard for accessing documents such as the W3C Document Object Model which is a platform to access and update certain programs and scripts of your web page content.

Though Google on most recommendations suggests that you should remove certain render-blocking JavaScript and flash files as shown in the screenshots of Page Speed Insights to make your website faster to load.

But if you want to include them within the content of your web page, take care of the following things.

i.  Preload your files in the script as an attribute in the HTML, this makes it easily accessible from the storage and executed when the page is used by a searcher

ii. Your Fonts in Flash or Java files could use some embedded information in the CSS sheet known as a fallback font from there it can be used when requested by the browser.

iii. Using Async and Defer attributes before the </body> tag of HTML or in the <head> tag because they can control the hows and whens of fetching and executing these external files while loading the page faster.

Now, these attributes help the web page decide which content to load first and this fetching and execution are conducted in mere seconds, keeping your web page speed to remain acceptable, that is within 3 seconds.

This is keeping the performance SEO of your website’s SEO speed in check.

Conclusion

In the finale, you must understand that Page speed is the fundamental and major factor in the Google algorithm which ranks your website accordingly and gains your business organic traffic.

So, if your website is not getting that organic traffic, it may be that your website page speed is slow due to heavy files, unnecessary codes, and too many HTTP requests causing traffic on your website and low page speed.

In this blog, I have covered the best practices for SEO of your web page speed and comprehend the performance SEO could give through compressive heavy files, CDNs used, chosen quality web hosting, and other discussed optimizations.

For more marketing tips and services, you can schedule a free-of-cost 30-Minute Strategy session with our experts. In this call, our experts would discuss your business and provide you with the free strategies that you can use to boost your sales and revenue.

FAQs

1. What is a good page speed?

Google recommends a page with good page speed must open in 2-3 seconds, but more than that.

2. What affects the page speed?

Page elements like, HTML code, CSS style page elements, java script files, images, videos and other things can affect the website page speed.

3. Why is website speed is so important?

The main reason why website page speed is so important is because it boost the user experience. If your page speed is not good, then your users will surely bounce back from your website.

To make the user stay on your website, you must work on web page speed.

4. How can I test my website speed?

Here, I am providing you a tool, you just need to paste the URL of your website and the tool will analyze the webiste speed.

https://www.dotcom-tools.com/website-speed-test

5. What is Google Page Insights used for?

Page speed insight reports provided free by Google, shows the performance report of both mobile and desktop and provides suggestions to improve the page performance.