If you are using the internet actively for business and have a website, SEO is inevitable for you. A good SEO strategy is everything when it comes to attracting organic traffic. SEO is not just ranking higher on the search engine page results; it is also providing an excellent user experience to your website visitors. However, it would be for nothing if you don’t have a good page speed. In this article, we will cover the page speed and SEO relation and why it is so crucial.
Nowadays, mobile access to the internet is pretty common. Even according to researches, more than 50% of searches made from the search engines are from mobile devices. That is why it is essential to have a mobile-friendly website for your business.
What Is Page Speed?
Before we dig into the page speed and SEO relation, it is better to mention what page speed is.
Page speed is the loading speed of a page. It should not be confused with site speed. Site speed is the speed when users try to interact with the content of your website. Page speed is the time that takes to show all of the content on a web page. Since there are many types of internet connections, the page speed of the same page might differ according to the connection. Especially on mobile, there are internet connections such as 3G, 4G, 5G or directly from the satellite when it cannot connect to the internet of the telecommunication company.
How Important Is Page Speed for SEO?
Page speed is something that directly affects the user experience. Pages with longer loading speed usually have higher bounce rates and less session time compared to faster loading pages. That is why you have to care about your page speed. Otherwise, all of the content and SEO works could become useless.
One other thing that makes page speed important for SEO is the site speed. According to Google, site speed is a ranking factor for SEO. A fast site is a better crawled site. How? When Google is crawling websites, it can reach fewer pages in slower websites, yet in faster websites, Google can crawl all of the pages more easily. If your website is slow and all pages cannot be crawled by Google, it will negatively affect the indexation.
What Is a Good Page Load Speed for SEO?
Since there are several types of internet connections, it is not possible to say an exact number. However, you can analyze your page speed by Google’s PageSpeed Insights and optimize your website in terms of page speed.
PageSpeed Insights of Google is actually a good tool to measure the performance of your page’s speed. It can tell you how good is your page speed by seconds and colors. As you can guess, there are three colors; red, yellow, and green. Red is the worst, and the green is the best result for these insights.
Here you can see information about the field data of your page, opportunities (these are the suggestions for improving the page speed), and the diagnosis part where it tells you the facts about your page speed.
Of course, you can use SEO tools to see the speed of your pages. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is not the only option. You can find such services in some of the most popular SEO tools as well.
How to Improve Page Speed?
Your page speed might be depending on many different factors. However, there are still some ways to improve your page speed. Now let’s take a look at some of the tips to improve page speed.
Create more space: One of the main reasons for lower page speed is that the large CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files. If you can reduce the size of these files and remove unnecessary things such as spaces between texts, commas, characters, etc., you can have a better page speed.
Minimize redirects: When a page redirects to another page, your visitors wait for the HTTP request-response. Removing unnecessary redirects is a good start.
Minimize the usage of blocking JavaScript: Google suggests that minimizing and avoiding the use of blocking JavaScript is also a way to have better page speed.
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Better Hosting: Your hosting services may not be able to provide enough response time for your pages’ traffic. Even if it was enough in the first place, you will need a better hosting that offers a better response time when your traffic starts to increase.
Smaller Images: It is important to have images that are not larger than they need to be. You can also use CSS sprites to get all of your images to be one large image that loads all once. It is better than having multiple images that need loading one by one.
Conclusion
We have covered the page speed and SEO relation. As we can see, the page speed is not something to skip. It affects SEO works and also the user experience. If you don’t want to have higher bounce rates, you have to focus on the page speed.
If you want to learn more about SEO, please read our latest articles about it. You may be interested in how to improve SEO.
You may be interested in How to Lazy Load Images? article also.
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