If your website suffers from slow loading speeds, you’re reducing the chances of ranking higher in search results and losing out on new customers and sales. Even a small delay of a couple of seconds can do significant damage to your ranking and limit your ability to drive traffic from Google. You need to improve page speed for your site right away. According to research by HubSpot, just a one-second delay in page speed results in 11% fewer page views.
How Does Page Speed Impact SEO?
Page speed has been a Google ranking factor since 2010, but it has become increasingly influential over the last few years. Backlinko recently conducted an extensive analysis of over a million search results, revealing that page speed has a direct impact on search ranking. The faster your website, the more likely it is going to rank in the tops spots of the search engine results page (SERP).
Not only is page speed a key ranking factor, but slow websites now risk being shamed by Google with a “slow” badge. Google recently announced a new badging system for Chrome, warning users about slow-to-load sites before they click on them in the search results. Having your business website labelled with a slow badge could be catastrophic for your traffic.
So, what can you do to improve page speed and boost your ranking on Google?
How to Test Your Page Speed
There are two easy ways to test the speed of your website. The first option is to check out your “Speed Report” in the Google Search Console (GSC). You can find this report in the left-hand menu of the GSC dashboard. This report uses the real data of your website visitors to assign your site a Fast, Moderate, or Slow rating.
If you want to do a quick check of your site speed without logging in to the GSC, you can run a live test of your page speed using PageSpeed Insights. This free tool will give your site a speed score out of 100 and offer recommendations to improve page speed.
How to Improve Page Speed
Compress Images
Images are great for improving the aesthetics of your webpages and encouraging visitors to stick around and see what you have to offer. However, images are usually the largest files on a web page and can have a significant impact on loading times.
To improve page speed, make sure that all your images are compressed and saved in the right file format for the web. This is especially important for your landing pages. According to research by Akamai, a 2.4 second loading time resulted in a peak conversion rate for landing pages. When the loading time was increased to 4.2 seconds, conversion rates declined to less than 1%.
Use a Content Distribution Network (CDN)
A CDN can improve page speed by utilizing multiple servers at different geographic locations. While that might sound complicated, a CDN basically creates multiple versions of your website and stores them at several different locations to spread the server demand. A CDN can improve page speed and enable your visitors to access your site faster.
Upgrade Your Hosting
Shared hosting can be a tempting way to save some money on your website running costs. However, cheap hosting that crams loads of websites onto a single server does come at a loss to your loading times. If you want to improve page speed, consider upgrading to dedicated hosting, or at least doing some research to identify a web host that offers reasonable speed. There are loads of hosting providers out there that prioritize speed, and some of them don’t cost much more than budget shared hosting.
Conclusion
Google’s speed badge announcement is the latest step in its quest to make the internet faster. Slow page speed is a web design mistake that you want to avoid, and it’s only going to increase in importance with each passing Google algorithm update. If you take the time to improve page speed, you’ll increase the chances of ranking higher in search results and provide your customers with the website experience they want.
