When considering ways to improve SEO ranking, page speed often gets forgotten about. In fact, it’s a really important factor for ranking well in search engine results.
Search engines like Google exist to provide an excellent service to their customers, which means directing them to helpful websites which are easy to use. If your website hangs and is awful to use, Google won’t want to tell people to use it.
Not only this, but a slow website will give your customers a worse experience, so it’s well worth ensuring that you give your site speed the attention it deserves.
How page speed impacts SEO ranking
The first thing to note is that nobody knows exactly what Google’s algorithm is! Logically, the most sensible thing to benchmark against is your load time in seconds.
You can also get an idea of how your page is doing from your PageSpeed insights score within Google analytics; however, there are many sights that have a reasonably low PageSpeed insights score and actually rank well, so this isn’t the only or most important factor.
So, having an idea of how quickly your page is actually loading for users is an important part of SEO. It’s important to remember, though, that page speed is at least in part determined by the location of your web server, so just because your site is running well for you doesn’t mean it’s running well in other countries!
Some tools which you can use to check your site speed are:
- Pingdom
- GT-Metrix
- Mod_pagespeed
- Google AMP
On-site hosting
If you are hosting your website, or any part of your website, on-site, then your network performance will impact your overall website performance.
If you want to maintain a responsive website, it’s important that you keep your network well maintained to deal with the amount of traffic coming through it without encountering issues. It’s also important to future proof your network so that it can handle the extra load as your business grows and starts using new technologies.
One of the best ways to do this is to work with a managed IT services provider who will be able to ensure that your network is functioning as efficiently as possible and doesn’t suffer unnecessary downtime.
Other factors impacting your page speed
As well as your server speed, there are a few other factors that may impact your page speed. If you are trying to improve performance, then you should look at:
1. Enabling compression. This means using a file compression tool to reduce the file size of anything over 150 bytes. For images, you should reduce the file size in photoshop rather than using a compression tool.
2. Optimize your JavaScript, HTML, and CSS code so that it runs as efficiently as possible - for example removing unnecessary spaces and other characters that you don’t need can dramatically improve speed.
3. Reduce your redirects. Every redirect means extra load time, so keep them to a minimum.
4. Consider using a content distribution network. This means your content will be loaded from multiple locations, which improves speed.
