Many factors impact the overall strength of your SEO. Page speed is one of them. If your pages don’t load quickly, users won’t stay on them very long. Eventually, this can have a negative effect on your organic search rankings.
It’s important to guard against this. To better understand the relationship between page speed and SEO, and what you can do if your pages take too long to load, consider the following key points.
Page Speed’s SEO Importance is Confirmed
The claim that page speed is important to SEO isn’t unfounded. On the contrary, research has essentially confirmed it plays a significant role. For example, did you know that 40% of people say they will leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load? Additionally, nearly half of consumers report expecting pages to load in two seconds or less.
Guests will not stay on your pages very long if they don’t load quickly. This will have a negative impact on your SEO.
While Google claims this factor doesn’t directly influence rankings, it can certainly have an indirect effect, as evidenced by Moz research, which shows that factors such as dwell time, time on site, and click-through rate can contribute to where a page shows up in relevant SERPs.
Luckily, poor page speed isn’t something you have to accept. There are steps you can take to improve this factor. They include the following:
‘Minify’ Files/Code
“Minifying” is the process of removing unnecessary elements from a piece of code. By cleaning up your site’s code, you can make pages load more quickly.
Coordinate with your developer to identify areas of code you can “minify.” However, if you use WordPress to manage your site’s content, you’re in luck, as plugins such as WPRocket assist in this process. Consider using it if you have a WordPress site that isn’t loading as quickly as it should. You can also use GNU Gzip to compress HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files of a certain size. This helps pages load faster as well.
Consider a Content Distribution Network
A Content Distribution Network (CDN) essentially distributes your content, as the name implies, across a network of servers, reducing the burden on individual servers. This allows CDN’s to provide users with Internet content more quickly. If cleaning up your code isn’t enough to meet your goals, you may consider using a CDN as well.
Don’t Forget to Compress Images
Including images in your content is an essential component of a strong SEO plan. Images help you break up content, allowing you to engage guests on an emotional level (and in the case of infographics, can condense a lot of information into a single piece of content).
Just make sure you’re compressing your images before adding them to your site. Large image files will have a negative impact on page speed.
Remember not to overlook the relationship between page speed and SEO when considering how to improve your site. It’s clear your pages need to load efficiently and reliably to optimize organic search rankings. These tips will help you get started on improving page speed SEO.
