With Google using page or site speed as one of its search engine ranking factor, site page became a significant SEO factor. This is because a site speed is not only used by Google as a usability metrics to help rank pages but also, it could have a great impact on your customers’ satisfaction and conversion as slow sites decrease customer satisfaction. Research has shown that an improvement in site speed can increase conversions.
Though Google stated in their official blog post that a site speed doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page, with fewer than 1% of search queries affected currently by the site speed signal, competing pages that have high relevancy scores and close link metrics and a faster loading time or site speed will really have a great impact. Many search engine optimization company experts believe that site speed could negatively hurt you if your page takes an excruciatingly painful amount of time to load.
Moreover, according to a study published in January 2010 by Forrester Research, users remember slow sites and consciously remember not to return. Thus, it is safe to presume that slow websites are bad for the brand. Remember, users’ first exposure to your brand is your website. Your website is the first time a user is able to interact with your brand. So, if you have a slow website loading time, your visitor might make an impression that it may not be easy to buy from or interact with your company. This might result in your visitor and potential customer becoming frustrated or establishing a lack of trust in your messaging – regardless of the market you are serving.
Additionally, with many competitor sites out there in the web, your slow website will certainly lose visitors and revenue to competitors with faster loading websites. As every website visitor is a potential costumer, it would decrease your conversions and consequently lower your ROI.
Furthermore, there is a direct correlation between a high site speed and the number of successful form fills; revenues and leads generated. If your site speed is low, there’s a great possibility that your visitors may never see the landing page or the form on your conversion page. According to Search Engine Optimization experts, along with design and content, your site speed all work together to drive your conversion ratios.
So how do you improve your site speed?
Professional SEO Tips to Improve Your Site Speed
Before you make improvements of your site speed, first do an assessment of your site speed. Google has an experimental Webmaster Tools Labs feature called Site Performance that shows you latency information about your site. Though, in order to see Site Performance data, you must add and verify your site ownership within Webmaster Tools.
Site Performance statistics shows you the average page load time for pages in your site, the trend over the last few months, and some suggestions on how to make the pages load faster.
You can also make use of Google’s Page Speed tool to test your site’s load speed so you can then make changes based on best practices.
Now, that you have assessed your site speed, it is now time to improve it. To decrease your load time, here are a few tips:
- Reduce HTTP Requests. Reduce the number of items that need to be loaded, such as scripts, style sheets, and images. In this way, your pages will load faster if they have to wait for fewer HTTP requests.
- Combine all of your CSS into an external file and link to it from the section each page instead of loading it in the HTML of a page. In this way, it will allow the external page to be cached so that it loads faster. You should also do this with JavaScript.
- Whenever possible, make use of CSS sprites. In this way, you can combine images used in the background into one image and reduce the number of HTTP requests made.
- Ensure that your images are optimized for the web. By optimizing the formats of the images you are essentially formatting the images in a smarter way so that you end up with a smaller file size.
- Make use of server side caching. In this way, you can create an html page for a URL so that dynamic sites don’t have to build a page each time that URL is requested.
- Lessen 301 Redirects. Avoid using 301 redirects if possible and don’t pile 301’s on top of each other. 301 redirects force the browser to a new URL and require the browser to wait for the HTTP request to come back.
Posted by SEO Australia
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