Does Page Speed Help in Your SEO Ranking?

How quick your websites start rendering requests from users has become a predominant factor in your website’s overall ranking. Google has made it so because most sites do not offer the best user experience when it comes to speed in rendering individual pages.

Trust me; you need a fast loading website to stand out and to satisfy your viewers. Well, in the new norm, Google has made a move to help developers and webmasters improve their websites speed by providing a set of tools. One of these tools is called PageSpeed Insight

In this article, we will be looking at how speed affects SEO ranking.

What Is Page Speed?

Why do you think page speed is necessary for SEO ranking? Before we dive in details on how page speed improves ranking, first, let us understand what page speed means.

They are lots of misinformation on the internet today with most people regarding page speed as website speed. Well, here is what you need to know. Page speed is the time it takes for your website to render the content of a specific page fully. It can also be described as the time it takes for your web browser to receive the first byte of information from the web server. On the other hand, Website speed is the average time it takes for your website to render several pages to your users.

As much as we want a fast loading website, there are lots of factors that can affect your page speed. From your scripts, HTML, videos, to graphics embedded in the site can all result in poor loading speed. However, in determining how well your websites beat your competitors in terms of speed, Google offers to test page speed on both the mobile version and Desktop version. This is because of the technology difference from both desktop and mobile users.

Ok, it is clear enough, right! Let us move down to understanding why you need page speed for SEO.

Does Page Speed Affect SEO?

Here comes the bigger question, does page speed affect SEO? Yes, it does affect SEO because faster pages are more efficient and provide a better user experience. Nobody wants to get stuck to a page that is taking forever to load.

At Google, users come first, and recently they have decided to treat that as a priority in your website ranking. The study carried out by google shows that 3G loading speed is very slow, and most users leave a site after 3s. This shows a bad user experience, and Google does not like ranking sites that provide a terrible user experience.

So how do you know a good site? These are things you need to keep in mind if you are testing your websites with any of the tools. If your site loads at 2.9s, it is comparable or faster than 50% of the site you can find on the internet. If it loads at 1.5s, it is ok, but you have a competition of about 75% on the web. If it loads at 0.8s, it is faster than 95% of the sites on the internet. It becomes a priority for every developer to hit the benchmark of 0.8s.

How Do You Analyze Your Page Speed?

There are many different tools that you can you to analyze your site’s page speed. Our preferred tool is GTmetrix. They offer a free analysis and breakdown of your site’s speed along with recommendations on how to fix and increase your speed. Most of the techniques to optimize your site’s speed are done on the backend server of your site, so you should consult a professional to implement those changes and increase your speed.

How do I speed up my site?

As I mentioned before, there are many techniques and strategies to optimize your site’s speed. Most of them are very technical and not easy to do unless you have a lot of experience building websites and working on servers.

The best thing for you to do is to consult a website professional and ask them to run a page speed test on your site and they can tell you what needs to be done.

Conclusion

Your page speed matters. We live in a world today where people are browsing a multitude of sites every day, the faster you can get information to your customer, the more likely they are to give you their business. If your site is taking too long to load, you might risk them abandoning your website and losing a potential client.

If you are interested in speeding up your site click here to set up a free consultation!