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How to Improve Page Speed
If you want to know How do I Improve Page Speed, keep reading. While many page speed tools will provide recommendations to help you, here are some of the most common things you can do to improve your page load time:
- Optimize Images: Pay attention to image size, compression, and format for each image on your site. WordPress plugins make it easy to handle this sort of thing automatically when you upload a new image to your site.
- Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: Without the code, your website won’t function. However, minifying the code compresses the file size, so you still get the functionality you need without a bloated file size.
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): A CDN stores copies of your website on servers across the globe and pulls the copy from the server closest to the user to speed up load time.
- Use Browser Caching: This allows computers to store specific files used to view your website so that when a user returns, some of the data is already there. Browser Caching saves time because the computer doesn’t have to download them again and improves page load speed.
Why Does Site Speed Matter to SEO?
Page speed refers to how quickly a page on your website loads. The quicker it loads, the better. The slower it loads, the more likely you will have people who click away from your website to find another source for the same information you provide. Images, code, and even your host can affect your page speed. If your site is slow, you’re missing out on conversions, and you’re likely hurting your search engine rank. Our SEO Company, SEO Inc, are experts in increasing page and site speed. Test our site and see for yourself! We can definitely help; reach out to us here to start a conversation.
Page Speed is a Ranking Factor
Google considers your page speed a ranking factor. In other words, you won’t rank as high if your site isn’t optimized to load quickly. Page and site speed is the case for both desktop and mobile search.
Loading time is a significant reason why people abandon your page. If it takes too long to load, people grow impatient and will go elsewhere. Google pays attention to page abandonment, and if you’re ranking high for something but getting a lot of abandonment, it will adjust the ranking accordingly. When your page is abandoned, Google assumes the users cannot find what they are looking for on your site and will tweak things to serve better results.
How Poor Load Speed Affects Your Bottom Line
Surveys show that nearly half of users expect a website to load in two seconds or less, and they tend to abandon sites that take longer than three seconds. The majority of shoppers who experience issues with a website say they won’t go back to the website to try to make a purchase again later. Nearly half of those shoppers say they would share their experience with a friend.
Research from Akamai shows a two-second delay in page load time can increase your bounce rate by more than 100%. You’re losing many visitors, which means those people aren’t buying your products or clicking your ads.
A one-second delay in page response could cost you 7% in conversions. That doesn’t sound like much, but if your e-commerce site makes $100,000 a day, that one-second page delay could cost you $2.5 million in sales yearly!
How to Check Your Page Speed
Want to see how your website stacks up? Here are a few tools to help you.
- Page Speed Insights: This tool from Google will help you see your site as they see it. Just enter your domain, then click Analyze. You’ll be given a list of opportunities to improve your page speed, with a bit of information about how to implement the suggestions.
- Web Page Test: With this tool, you enter your website and choose a test server location for either desktop or mobile devices. If you select a server close to where your site is hosted, it will not take as long, so to get a more accurate picture, choose a testing server that is geographically far from your host server. You can also select the browser you want to test the speed in, which makes this an excellent tool for checking to be sure your users get a good experience regardless of their browser choice. You can also change the connection speed, too.
- GT Metrix: This tool analyzes your website and then gives you actionable recommendations on improving your site speed. One suggestion for everyone is to place JavaScript at the bottom of your code so that users don’t see a blank screen while JavaScript is loading.
Check your page speed now, and see what kind of recommendations you can analyze and fix. If you need assistance, the team here at SEO Inc. would be glad to help you! Get in touch with us today to learn more about how we can help optimize your site, not just for search engines but for better user experience.
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