What is Speed Optimization?

Speed optimization are steps you can take to make your website faster which should be a priority because the speed of your website impacts your user experience. It also increases bounce rate so if you have people visiting your site and leave after 5 seconds, they are not even waiting for your page to load.

Page Speed Insights is a tool from Google where you can see your site’s speed results and overall optimization.

Why is Page Speed Important?

Fast websites have higher conversion rates, better ranking in search engines, lower bounce rates and of course, a better user experience than slow websites.

It is important to mention that your mobile site is separate from the speed test results of the desktop version, either way both will hurt your SEO if a website is slow.

High conversion rates mean that your visitors are buying from you or doing what you need them to do, whatever ‘conversion’ means to your business, for example: buy a product, registering for a course, subscribing to a newsletter, downloading a document from your site, etc. and all that factors in when they can seamlessly navigate to your site and everything loads fast so they don’t notice the site loading or taking more than 5 seconds to load. According to the Hubspot research, 1 second delay means 7 percent reduction in conversions.

Now you know that Google takes into consideration the speed of your site when ranking  websites. When a website performs poorly, everything else performs the same way and due to that fact, your results in Google’s search results will be buried. 

What Can I Do to Increase Speed?

Tools like Page Speed Insights or GTmetrix can help you guide your speed goals easily since they divide the speed issues into easily manageable tasks like optimizing images or reducing file sizes, minimizing scripts and other tasks.

Results will vary from tool to tool because some include what others don’t. Also some results are out of your control because they consider third party scripts from plugins for example, part of the issue, where you can’t access plugin code, so you won’t ever get to a 100 result. 

Don’t worry about that, as long as your website is loading in less than 3 seconds your search engine results won’t suffer. But remember there’s always room for improvement since websites are ever changing environments, make sure to check your results often if your site is posting content or updating information constantly.

Need help with optimizing your site? We can help you! Contact us to get a quote today.