Optimisation of your websites’ page speed is of absolute importance nowadays. Page speed alludes to the time users have to spend waiting for a page to load on their web browsers.
Google declared “page speed” as one of the most important ranking factors in the year 2010. At that time they only planned to focus on desktop searches.
However, since the year 2018 its ranking algorithm is also considering the performance and speed of your web pages on smartphones as well.
Google conducted a study in 2018 and it showed that about 54 percent of smartphone users avoid visiting a site that doesn’t load within 3 seconds.
In fact, Google even altered its ranking algorithm with a new speed update. That will probably give you an idea as to how important is it for an SEO expert to optimise page speed.
Google’s ranking algorithm has always given importance to traditional ranking factors such as backlinks.
Somewhat equal importance is now being given to user experience as well.
However, the increasing importance of user experience over the years does not mean that backlinks have lost their credibility.
Fast page speed results in improved user experience.
It leads to improved conversion rates.
Fast page speed results in better rankings on search engines and enhances your brand’s image.
SEO marketers have to improve and analyse their page speed. The best way to start doing it is to do regular clean up, test your speed, gZIP compression, utilise cache, minify CSS & JavaScript and image optimisation.
You may use an image compression tool to compress your images. This will help you reduce the size of these files, leading to faster page speed. This practice will certainly have a positive effect on your search engine rankings.
I would suggest you to use the Optimus Image Optimiser.
Google recommends most of the websites to minify their website’s HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
The best thing you can do is to move your JavaScript snippets or CSS rules to an external file instead of using the exact code on every web page.
Caching can decrease the load on your servers and assists your websites in avoiding delays while relaying the desired information of your visitors.
You can choose to cache several things including images, database queries and HTTP.
gZIP is a file compression software. You may use it to compress the size of JavaScript HTML and CSS files expect images.
If you’ll enable this software, it will instruct your server to put all of the above-mentioned objects in a container (single) before sending them over to the browsers.
Test your web speed regularly in order to point out the areas of improvement. Testing tools often suggest removal of unnecessary or redundant code.
Striving to achieve better scores will definitely result in greater speed. However, you will have to ensure that you are striking the right balance between the user experience and page speed improvements.
Some of the best testing tools include YSlow, Pingdom, GT metrix and Page Speed Insights.
Outdated or unused content and extensions can also drag your website down by taking a toll on the loading capacity of your server. So make sure that your content and extensions are always updated.
Intelicle is a renowned and professional SEO agency in Nottingham that provides SEO expert services to all kinds of organisations both big and small. Our team of experts will help you design a creative and effective SEO campaign that will certainly help you gain leads and boost your digital presence.
Shiza is a content writer at Intelicle.LTD, A digital marketing agency. She is an expert in writing blogs about the latest trends and technologies.