How to increase website speed and its importance

increase website speed

Every third person experiences a slow performance of the website page while browsing. In that case, either the person will wait for the page to load or shift to the next page. Usually, people rarely opt for wasting their Time in such types of errors as for every one of us,’ Time is money. ‘ That is to say, website speed matters a lot for our visitors and us as well. Meanwhile, website speed does not just affect the situation as mentioned above. In addition, it reflects even more on the performance of our site. Before proceeding further, let us consider the importance of website speed in our day-to-day digital life.

IMPORTANCE OF WEBSITE SPEED:

Here are some of the critical factors responsible for the page loading speed. Let’s systematically look at these factors so that none of them misses our insight.

Impact On SEO

Have you ever noticed why page speed is essential for SEO? The visitors choose your site for the required content for some or other reasons. One of them is your visibility on internet browsers such as Google. In other words, the location on Google decides the number of visitors to your site and the conversions. Now, that directly links to your rankings. To clarify, Google ranks your website for some of the most critical factors in which page speed is crucial. So, directly it affects your SEO marketing strategy.

Impact on User Experience

As discussed, site speed directly impacts user experience and conversion for prospects into customers. User experience does not merely affect SEO but also involves Paid Social and Paid Search. We often notice people bounce off of sites. By bounce, we mean the activity of every single visitor who does not even view more than one page of your site before leaving the area. And this particular pace is referred to as bounce rate. Thus, bounce rate reflects user experience, which is our primary focus.

Impact on Social Ads

Site speed has a similar impact on Social Ads. As Google and Facebook are almost in the same vein in terms of sociability, Facebook, just like Google, counts on the high-quality speed with ads put into focus. Moreover, in 2017, Facebook introduced an algorithmic change that prioritized user experience, where site speed was a preferred reason. Thus, your ads to be prioritized or not will depend on the site speed and user experience.

Impact on Paid Search

Similar to Social Ads, site speed impacts Paid Search as well. You must know your quality score determines that keyword bidding. In terms of paid media, the quality score depends on how relevant Google considers your site’s landing page to a related search term, i.e., the keyword. It targets the user experience based on how that specific keyword drove the person to your site. Ultimately, Google will consider slow site speed due to poor user experience, which would turn down your quality score.

How to improve your page speed?

Now, since you are pretty aware of all the consequences of website speed, the first step is to consider the current performance of your website’s speed. That is to say; you must be knowledgeable about the page speed test. Now, several free tools are capable of running this analysis. Our primary tools include the Google site speed tool PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix, and Pingdom. The only process is to run an automated analysis of your website URL. Ultimately, you will get a report that thoroughly focuses on the page speed insights and areas required for improvement.

Assessing overall user-experience

Just optimizing your site may not work correctly for your page speed to act accordingly. Instead, it may lead your attention towards the following metrics that complement site speed:

  1. Successful navigation and consequent response from the server
  2. The content should be engaging enough for the visitors.
  3. The users must interact with the page, i.e., the carrier must not be busy loading.
  4. The interactions must be smooth and free of lag.

Once these aspects get a clear response from your side, you’ll have a good sense from the end-user perspective as well. That is to say, you may quickly get into the minds of your customers and help their overall experience right off the bat. And these improvements may further lead to significant conversions.

Now, let’s dive more deeply into the river of improving page speed to understand eliminating unnecessary elements that may be responsible for bogging down your page loading time. A quick overview may help you with better ideas for the most efficient site speed:

(i) Minimizing landing page redirects, link shorteners, and plugins. 

(ii) Removing render-blocking javascript

(iii) Utilizing multi-region hosting resulting in improving server response time 

(iv) Compressing files to decrease mobile rendering timing

(v) Using a high-quality content delivery network, thus reaching your audience quickly

(vi) Dynamically adjusting the content for slower connections/devices

Process:

But before understanding further, let’s go through the process behind the above-mentioned necessary steps. 

The site speed optimizations may take a few weeks to two months. That is to say, it depends on the number of pages and issues that are hindering site speed.

Firstly to improve site speed, you need to simplify your design. Now, this refers to streamlining the number of elements lying on your page. Meanwhile, you may use CSS instead of images, combine multiple style sheets into one, and ultimately settle them at the bottom of the page. The process mentioned above is crucial is helpful in efficient site design.

Now, our next milestone is reducing your server response time. Now, the goal should be less than 200 milliseconds. According to the recommendation by Google, one should use a web application monitoring solution and check for bottlenecks in performance. 

Ultimately, we are on our next and one of the most critical goals, i.e., enabling compression. Large pages, created with a mission of high-quality content, are often 100kb or more and, thus, are slow to load. The best way to speed up the page load time is to zip them, also known as compression. After compression, some vital part of the website speed is minifying your resources, i.e., deleting unnecessary codes, i.e., spaces, indentation, and line breaks. It would help if you also optimized images for size and format.

Website speed is an excellent part of digital marketing services nowadays. Further, online presence has a significant impact on your rankings in terms of SEO. Consequently, it significantly impacts paid ads, quality scores, user experience, and conversion. Thus, it would help if you went deep into the primary roots of your slow website speed. The process mentioned above may undoubtedly help you with the same.