- 08/11/21
- admin
SEO trends are constantly growing as search engines modify their algorithms. Now that more businesses have moved online due to the pandemic, your website has become more important than ever. Beyond having valuable content and a visually appealing layout, your site must be fast and interactive.
Speed can make or break any website, but many business owners overlook this critical SEO element. Faster loading pages will translate to a better user experience, which in turn will improve your SEO ranks and boost your returns. If you have yet to check out your site speed, it is high time to do so now.
Site Speed is an Important Ranking Factor for Google
How does speed impact your website and overall business? Here are some of the top reasons why site speed matters more than ever:
- Achieve better SEO rankings. Google’s recent addition of the Core Web Vitals as a factor for evaluating page experience has emphasized the importance of page speed. The three metrics, which assess loading times, interactivity, and visual stability, all ultimately affect your page speed, so you have to optimize them accordingly.
- Decrease bounce rates. Users nowadays want quick and instant information, so the longer it takes your page to load, the more likely they are to leave. Compare, a 9.6% bounce rate in a two-second loading page to a 13% bounce rate in a three-second loading page. Truly, a single second can make all the difference.
- Increase conversion rates. Many studies have shown how improvements in page loading times lead to an increase in conversions. For example, Walmart saw a 2% increase in their conversion rates for every second of improvement in loading speed.
Best Practices to Increase Website Speed
Your website speed can be a result of many different factors, but generally, some of the best practices include the following:
- Optimize media files. Images can be major culprits for slow loading times, so make sure to compress them and use file formats like WebP.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN). When you host your site on a single server, it becomes difficult to accommodate high volumes of traffic since it takes time to process each request. A CDN can solve this issue by distributing the load so that browser requests are routed to nearby servers.
- Enable compression. Smaller files load faster, so enabling compression with applications like Gzip is a must-do for your website.
- Leverage on caching. Browsers cache information to avoid having to reload everything whenever site visitors arrive. Generally, you can set a long period for the cache expiry as long as your site design does not change too frequently. This way, your pages will load much faster since they are pulling from output stored in your server’s memory.
