How Page Speed Affects Your SEO Ranking

Not only does your audience get frustrated with slow page speeds, but Google does, too. If your speed is lagging, your SEO and ranking may be as well, as page speed is one of the (many) factors Google considers when ranking a website. “If your site is taking too long to load,” Donna Duncan at B2C warns, “Google’s crawlers could abandon the effort and exit before indexing completes.”

If you’re concerned about your page speed, you’re not alone. A Trilibis study, which included tests of big brand websites like Starbucks, found that load times for 69% of responsive design mobile sites were deemed “unacceptable,” meaning they took four or more seconds to load on a smartphone.

KISSmetrics reports that 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less, and a one second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. Clearly, speed is important to your customers, your business, and to Google. So, how can you test and improve your page speed?

Dig Into Speed Tool Data

Google’s PageSpeed Insights: This tool measures the performance of a page for mobile and desktop devices and issues a score from 0 to 100 pointsthe higher the score the better; 85 and above is a good indicator that you’re performing well. It’s an official tool of Google, the giant you’re trying to appease, so it’s a safe and a trustworthy bet.

GTmetrix: This resource combines the Google PageSpeed Insights and Yahoo! YSlow tools to grade your site’s performance and suggest remedies to any issues. It also provides a timeline of how a page was rendered, letting you see which specific elements of a page are causing high load times. GTmetrix is free but also has premium options available that let you look deeper into your scores.

Pingdom: Useful to “experts and novices alike,” this tool tests your page speed load times like the preceding options and can also send out alerts via SMS and email regarding your performance. You can try a 30-day free trial in which Pingdom will monitor your uptime and response time daily.

Optimize Your Images

That study we mentioned with 69% unacceptable ratings? The authors say the slow load times were the result of image-heavy sites. “While a number of factors can determine the overall weight (i.e., size in bytes) of a web page, images are generally the principle contributor,” Trilibis explains. “This is particularly true for responsive websites, which generally serve the same content to all devices. This can lead to overly large images being served to mobile devices.” After optimizing images, Trilibis was able to minimize page weight by 77 percent on smartphones. If you don’t have a techie on staff, this can just mean using smaller images so that your pages load faster.

Host Your Files Locally

Local files almost always load faster than files hosted externally on sites like Flickr. By having files on your own servers, you’ll save the browser a time-sucking trip outside of your site to download the data.

Get Rid of Unnecessary Components

If you have plugins, add-ons, forms, widgets, excess ads, and the like, consider re-evaluating which of these things are really contributing to the quality of your site and which are just taking up space and slowing you down.

Get Technical

There are several more nitty-gritty tactics like cleaning up code, compressing pages, reconsidering hosting services, and cutting back on cookies—but these steps might not be manageable for those without a web development background so we’ll refer you (or your resident designer) to these techie tips at Tech.Co and Web Jackalope.

Or, better yet, you can just let McAllister Marketing take care of your page speed, responsive design and SEO. Contact us to get on the fast track and to have a professional marketing firm take care of all your marketing needs.

 

 

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