Your website speed dramatically impacts your entire digital marketing efforts, from search engine optimization to conversion. A slow website is doomed to failure. When you operate in a competitive environment where user experience decides everything, you can’t let a slow business website lose your hard-earned traffic.
The longer your website takes to load, the less satisfied your visitors will be. While Google makes page speed an important ranking factor, business owners are now realizing the devastating impact a slow website can have on their ROI. This blog post will help you understand how page speed affects your Google rankings and what you can do to improve it.
What is page speed?
“Page Speed” and “Site Speed” are two different terms that are often used interchangeably. Page speed is the time it takes for a web page to load its content. Google Page Insights is a recommended tool for analyzing the speed of your websites. The speed index is an important indicator that shows how fast your websites are. It refers to the average time that visible parts of a page are displayed.
When it comes to page speed, every second counts. It goes without saying that your average user has no patience for a page that takes too long to load. If your web pages load in less than a second, you don’t need to do anything. However, your pages still need improvement if they load in 2-3 seconds. Anything over 4 seconds is a warning sign and requires immediate attention. A one second delay in page speed can reduce your conversion rate by 7%.
If your website isn’t fast enough to provide a good user experience, it’s time to fix the problem Improve your Google ranking. Here are some useful tips to speed up your website and make it more user-friendly and search-friendly:
2. Optimize images
Images are an essential part of any modern website. With the growing need for visual content, you can’t create a converting website without high-quality, relevant images. Images make it easier for you to convey emotions and bring your text to life. However, it’s never ideal for large images to slow down your website. Various tools allow you to optimize the size of your images without compromising their quality. First, you need to use the correct format and then compress your images using a compression tool. Properly optimizing your images leads to faster loading times and better SEO results. Adobe Photoshop is a popular tool that you can use to optimize your visual content.
3. Enable Gzip compression
Gzip compression is a helpful technique used to reduce the size of various web page files and speed up website loading time. If you want to achieve fast loading times on your WordPress website, reducing the page size is an essential step. Enable Gzip compression is an effective way to optimize your pages and ultimately reduce the time a user spends downloading your web data.
HTML and CSS files often contain a lot of repetitive text and whitespace, which can significantly increase the speed of your pages. With Gzip compression you can reduce the size of your pages by up to 70%
4. Use browser caching
Browser caching stores website resource files on a local computer when someone visits your website. When someone visits one of your web pages, the browser has to load several elements on your page: CSS files, logo, and other resources. When you use browser caching, it improves page load time for your returning visitors. However, if you set the parameters for too long, it will be difficult for your returning visitors to see the updated version of your website.
5. Reduce CSS, JavaScript and HTML
Minification is a process that removes unnecessary data without affecting the way a browser processes your web pages. Minimize HTML, CSS and JavaScript are a good technique to optimize the speed of your websites. HTMLMinifier and Closure Compiler are two recommended tools for minimizing your web resources.
Diploma
From optimizing your images to minimizing web resources, you can use these techniques. Taking into account the massive impact of Page speed As you improve your Google ranking and conversion rate, you need to take important steps to make your business website more efficient and faster.
About Reach First
As a full-service digital marketing agency in Canada, we specialize in web development and building fast and converting websites for our clients. We have what it takes to build a solid online presence for your business. Feel free to schedule a free consultation to discuss your web development and digital marketing needs!