Why Page Speed Matters and How to Get Your Website to Load Faster!

Google has made page speed a key ranking criterion, which means that it determines an internet business’s success. You must take website performance optimisation measures to maintain your company’s leadership. Poor website performance affects any online business severely.  So, it is important to know why page speed matters and how to get your website to lead faster.  According to statistics, 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than three seconds to load, leading us to believe that impatience is the most prevalent characteristic of modern online user behaviour. It’s not difficult to increase page speed, which is fantastic news.  In this post, we’ll discuss the significance of a website’s loading speed as well as technical implementations, tools, and advice for a quicker website, more visitors, and better search engine rankings. 

What’s the meaning of page speed?

The term “page speed” describes how quickly a specific page loads from the website hosting servers and appears in the web browser that is requesting it. The amount of time that passes between clicking on a link and the requesting browser displaying the whole content of the website is known as the page load time. If it takes a while for your website to load, there may be a server issue. Apart from the fact that customers detest slow-loading websites, poor page speed will result in Google penalising your website. If it takes more than 0.4 seconds for a website to load, it is slow. The ideal page load speed, according to Microsoft experts and computer scientist Harry Shum, is 0.25 seconds. The term “website speed” or “website performance” describes how quickly a browser loads a website’s fully functional web pages. Users may become disinterested in websites with poor performance or slow browser rendering. On the other hand, websites with faster loading times tend to attract more visitors and have higher conversion rates. 

Importance of page speed for SEO

• Conversion rate

Numerous studies show that site speed affects conversion rate, or the rate at which visitors complete their prefers activity. On websites that load quickly, users not only remain longer but also convert at higher rates than on slower websites. Many businesses have discovered that a few milliseconds off the website load time boosts conversions: Mobify discovered that a 100-millisecond reduction in the load time of their homepage led to a 1.11% increase in session-based conversion. Walmart found that a one-second improvement in page load time resulted in a 2% increase in conversions.

• Sales

The user experience on a website translates into online sales, which in turn fuels corporate growth. Revenue for businesses will suffer greatly if website loading times are not up to consumer expectations. If a page loads slowly, 14% of online shoppers will start buying from a different website. 

• User Interaction

When developing techniques to increase online sales, one crucial factor for website research is user engagement. The significance of website performance underpins the competitive landscape of online enterprises. Utilise technologies capable of analysing and projecting the optimal course of action for managing the relationship between page speed and income. An online business’s “recipe of success” is to improve user engagement through responsive design and lightning-fast website loading times. 

• Utilisation

Providing users with clear and straightforward information is refers to as usability. All information must be compatible with a wide range of devices and browsers, and the essential elements must be positioned in the right places. Consumers want websites to be simple to use and navigate, to deliver information, goods, or services with little effort on their side, to be responsive, and to provide pertinent information. Better usability will come from fewer clicks or actions on the part of the customer.   

• Income

A few seconds’ faster pages can improve income, save operating expenses, and need less hardware purchases when website performance is invested in. For instance, Shopzilla’s operational expenditure was cut by 50% while increasing income by 12% and reducing page load time from 7 to 2 seconds. Better AdWords Quality Scores result in lower Cost per Click (CPC) and are another benefit of website enhancements. A website with a high-quality score and a fast-loading websites and SEO benefits time will maximise its reach and draw in new clients by using the marketing money more wisely and effectively.   

Ways to Increase Page Speed Increase Website Loading Speed with SEO

One of the normal operating processes you need to follow to rank your site on Google’s first page is to increase site speed.  It is evident that Google places a high value on website usability and only gives rankings to those that offer a better user experience.  After studying your PSI report, you should address the identifies problems. Here are a few easy SEO optimisation methods for page speed impact on mobile users that you may use to speed up your website’s load time.

• Postpone Offscreen Pictures

Regarding pictures further, you can delay offscreen images to improve your page speed SEO. Lazy loading is the technique of giving priority to the images that the user can see while the page loads. Once all of the important resources have loaded, the other images do as well. It shortens the interactive time. You must install a plugin that allows you to postpone offscreen pictures in order to enable lazy-loading on your website. 

• Make Your Code Cleaner

Your website will load faster and your engineers will be satisfied with neat code. Reducing page load time for conversions the amount of site files may greatly increase site performance. The front-end files have a significant impact on loading speed. It is advisable to notice even little details like indentations, superfluous spaces, and line breaks. Back-end languages like Ajax and JavaScript can affect how page load time affects user experience.

• Incorporate Video Content

Having video material on your website is a terrific idea. You can use videos to walk clients through a process or to explain how your product works. Videos, however, are heavy and might negatively impact your page speed SEO. Don’t upload them straight to your website to avoid them slowing it down. Videos not only hog system resources, but also strain your server. Store them somewhere else and embed the content on your page rather than uploading it all at once to your website. Your load times will be much faster as a result, improving the user experience.  

• Enable Web Caching

One essential page performance optimizing images for faster website speed strategy is browser caching, which makes websites load more quickly for frequent visitors.  A visitor’s device stores a range of data when they visit a website that has browser caching enabled, including stylesheets, JavaScript files, pictures, and videos. In this manner, when a user returns to the website, the browser won’t need to load this data again. As a result, returning users experience an improved website, which loads a little faster. You will need to make some changes to your website’s files in order to enable browser caching. It will need a skilled developer to put this change into practice.

• Reducing CSS and JavaScript

Sometimes CSS and JavaScript files are bigger than necessary.  Sometimes, in order to get their JavaScript and CSS to function, developers insert extra characters like carriage returns and spaces. These characters are a waste of space and slow down the loading time of web pages from an SEO perspective. Reduce superfluous characters from your website’s CSS and JavaScript files to increase page speed tools for website performance. These files will load faster and be lighter if duplicates and unnecessary spaces are removed.   

• Reduce the Number of Redirects to Increase Site Speed

Your website’s loading speed may suffer if there are too many redirects. This is mostly because every page redirect lengthens the time it takes for an HTTP request to be answered, thereby increasing load time.  Page loading rates can be improved by removing superfluous redirects, even though they are sometimes necessary, such as when switching to a new domain. 

• Don’t use too many plugins.

Plugins enhance your website, but they can also have an impact on it. In addition to slowing down your website, having too many on it could cause security problems, technical difficulties, or even crashes. Therefore, you should consider eliminating some of them.  We suggest using P3 or Plugin Performance Profiler to find the plugins causing problems or slowing down the loading of your website. 

Comparing the Speed of Desktop and Mobile Pages

You will get two scores when using Google’s tool to examine the performance of your website: one for the desktop version and one for the mobile version. In order to assess mobile websites for speed, Google switched to a mobile-first index in 2018 as more than 50% of user queries were conducted on mobile devices.  Remember that the mobile version will display the mobile speed result first. A mobile connection was used to evaluate your website. When working on the speed of your mobile page, we advise considering 3G connections as well, since often the slowness is not with your site but rather with the speed of your connection.  The desktop version will receive a higher score because of the faster connection. The same testing procedure is applied to the website. The connection speed is the only variable.  As a result, given their slower connection, we advise concentrating on making the website speed optimization techniques for mobile users.

Test Procedure for Page Load Speed

You can enter the URL of a page and do a speed test using dozens of free programmes available online. Even if a lot of these speed tests work well, there’s a strong likelihood you’re using them incorrectly. Even though you might not think much of it, taking an erroneous speed test actually does matter. If you do a speed test incorrectly, you won’t be able to determine where adjustments are needed, or even worse, you might try to enhance sections that are already doing very well. So how can one conduct an accurate speed test? Make use of these two steps:

Prior to administering your test.

Verify whether you have previously set up and are using caching on your website along with your content delivery network. If not, inquire about putting these up with your web developer or hosting company.

Conduct your speed test correctly.

By conducting tests from both a nearby and a distant location in relation to your data centre. This will assist you in assessing the degree to which page performance is impacted by your content delivery network. Temporarily disable your CDN and retest your site from the same location if you cannot reach a remote location. As this article has demonstrated, several ways improve website loading speed can help your company. The speed of your website can affect sales, conversion rate, and organic visitors. Getting support from stakeholders in different teams may be necessary to speed up a website for users.  Making tough choices concerning features, usability, and design components that affect performance may be necessary. Organizationally, management approval may be necessary for the additional engineering time and resources needed.  Our team of carefully chosen experts can offer advice on anything related to page performance, from our environmentally friendly, cutting-edge web hosting servers to our expertise in image compression and site design. Thus, give us a call right now if your website has to pick up the pace to stand out in the online competition. To know more follow us on Facebook.