Suppose you’ve created a brand new website for your business or company. You have put work into making sure the website is functional, your designs look good, and you target the appropriate keywords. 

But, for some reason, you still have a high bounce rate coupled with a low dwell time. Maybe you don’t know about these statistics, but all you know is that your website operates at a snail’s pace. 

Slow website speeds can turn off customers in record time. This page speed can easily make or break your business and dictate how your sales and revenue numbers will proceed. Additionally, it determines how capable your customer (and prospective customers!) will deem your business to handle their needs. 

Before we start, let’s limit all previously held notions about Page Speed and define what it is. 

What is Page Speed, Exactly?

Page Speed is how long it takes for a web page on your website to load fully. Many factors influence page speed, including how compressed your files and source code are, what server you use, and more. 

There are multiple “Page Speeds” that you can measure. The most common (and essential) one is the complete or fully loaded page speed. This value is how much time a web page on your website takes to load all of its resources, fully displaying the page. As you can imagine, this is the most apparent and significant means page speed is measured in the website SEO world. 

You can also measure other page speeds that are no’t as essential. One example of these page speeds is First Contextual Paint or First Meaningful Paint speed. In a nutshell, this value indicates how long your website will take to load the first readable part of your website with which your web visitor can start reading and interacting. If this speed is fast, it can give the visitor the illusion that your website loads fast, even if you have a slow overall page loading speed. 

This case is dicey, though, because you must consider how soon your website user will want to start clicking buttons. What if the page “looks” like it has loaded, but they cannot click anything for ten seconds because it is read-only?

The irritation resulting from this scenario will be mild but enough for a user to leave your website and seek greener website SEO elsewhere.

Why is “Page Speed” Important for Your Website’s SEO and Rankings?

In 2018, Google launched the “Speed Update,” citing that people want answers to their search queries as soon as possible. Therefore, websites (mobile and desktop alike) need to create a fast web page loading experience for users.

If a website owner can accomplish this feat, significant rewards in the form of higher rankings on Google’s SERP await them. But if they fail and their website is slow, Google is ready to punish them by lowering their rankings.

While a slow page can still rank high if it matches up significantly with user intent, its chances of ranking first for its target keywords become slim to none. Therefore, by not focusing on Page Speed, you are missing out on high-quality, converting traffic to your website resulting from prestigious and coveted rankings on Google’s SERP.

How can You Measure Your Page Loading Speed? 

You can use the Google Page Speed Insights tool to find out your website’s current page speeds. The tool will spit out relevant tips to improve your page speed and, inevitably, website SEO.

Top Tips

Here are some of the actions you can have a website seo experts implement on your website to improve your page speed.

Compress Your Website Images

Images can take up a significant portion of your website’s page size. Therefore, you can use image compression software and plugins to help with this endeavor. One example is the WP Smush plugin for WordPress website SEO.

Compress Your Website’s Code

Another option that will help improve your page speed is to compress your website’s code. Whether the code your website uses is HTML, CSS, Java, or otherwise, you can have “unnecessary” codes removed. 

Having the fat trimmed from your code can help you improve your page speed and website SEO effectively.

Change or Upscale Your Hosting Platform

At times, the problem might be the hosting platform you use. If your website is set up to receive many visitors, but your web hosting platform is no’t capable of or effective at handling your traffic, chances are it will work very slowly.

In this way, investing in a better platform can revolutionize your website SEO efforts. 

Make Sure to Activate Browser Caching

Our final bonus tip for getting to the end of this blog post will be to activate caching on your website. Caching will help repeat visitors on your website load your pages faster because their browsers already remember parts of your website! 

Don’t lose sleep over page speed but don’t forget it either! A reputable website SEO expert can help you conveniently improve your page speed as soon as possible.

Guest article written by: Dennis Nguyen is a Senior Account Manager at Search Berg—a competitive digital marketing agency based in the United States. His specialty is in SEO Services, including improving website page speeds to rank on Google. Additionally, he offers backlinking services within his full-service digital marketing agency. Over his illustrious career, Dennis has helped businesses worldwide significantly increase their rankings on Google’s SERP and their sales by implementing highly impactful SEO strategies. He regularly writes digital marketing pieces for the Search Berg blog.