How Page Speed Important for Search Engine Optimization

Page speed is important for SEO and users. It helps improve your site’s visibility in search engines, improves user experience and customer satisfaction.

Why page speed is important for search engine optimization?

Page speed is a search engine ranking factor because it’s also a user experience (UX) factor.

A good user experience leads to higher conversions and higher sales. A user that has a good experience with your business will tell others about it, resulting in more traffic and sales for you. Time on site is also a ranking factor. The more people enjoy your site, the more it will be served up in SERPs. One of the biggest reason people bounce from a website is that the website was too slow.

How to check your page speed?

There are various tools available to measure page speed. Some of the most popular tools are:

  • Pingdom Website Speed Test (Pingdom)
  • GTmetrix (GTmetrix)
  • Google PageSpeed Insights
  • WebPageTest (WebPageTest)
  • YSlow
  • Lighthouse

What are the factors affecting page speed?

The following are the factors that determine page speed:

  • The number of elements on a page (such as images, scripts, stylesheets and so forth)
  • The size of these elements in terms of bytes downloaded. An average webpage might have 20-30 unique resources that accounts for its total weight in kilobytes. For example, a simple homepage with basic styling and a few images will be around 50Kb while an eCommerce website with several layouts, a lot more content and dozens of images can go up to 1MB+. In general, avoid loading unnecessary resources like plugins and third party scripts since they take time to load and could cause unnecessary delay in rendering your website or app.
  • Redirects – It’s important that you only redirect users when absolutely necessary. This includes temporary redirects and permanent ones such as 301s.

These tips will help you speed up your web pages

Use a CDN. A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers that serve content to end users, typically from multiple locations. The goal is to provide high availability and high performance.

Use a hosting provider that has a data center close to your users. If you’re in the US or Europe, it makes sense to use a hosting provider with data centers on these continents.

Use caching plugins such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache on your WordPress site if you have one; they’ll help speed up page loads by pre-fetching resources like JavaScript files ahead of time and storing them in PHP instead of generating them dynamically upon request every time someone visits your site.

A Faster Site Mean More Traffic

Page speed is one of the most important factors affecting your SEO. The faster your page loads, the better it will be for your SEO. This is because Google has always put a lot of emphasis on how quickly a website responds and how much time it takes to load in order to rank higher in search results.