How website speed impacts the performance of your business
Website speed has long contributed to the overall performance of your site from a user experience perspective and an SEO perspective. In fact, it’s even so important that it’s a Google ranking factor. Yet there are still many websites that don’t take into account website speed when trying to improve their site.
In this blog, we are going to take more of a look at how website speed impacts how your website ranks and its overall performance.
Why you need a speedy website
In 2010, Google began taking load time into account as a factor for ranking a website. Google defines page speed as “the speed at which an individual page loads on your website. Different pages can have different speeds due to factors such as images and scripts.”
From a user perspective, a slow loading website is boring and when people are in a rush, they don’t want to wait ages for a website to load. Users want to enter a website and to see text, images and other components loaded within a matter of seconds.
From an SEO perspective, Google wants to serve consumers and it wants consumers to be matched with websites that meet their such queries and provide them with a good service. So, if you aren’t able to offer a good user experience then Google will pick up on this and mark you down for it which can impact your overall organic rankings.
What can you do about it?
Firstly, to get an idea of how quickly or slowly your website loads you should do a test to check it. This can be done using Google Developers PageSpeed Insights tool. You simply input your URL and it will give you a score out of 100 for both Mobile and Desktop loading speed – the closer to 100, the better!
The PageSpeed Insights tool will also give recommendations on how website speed can be improved, so that webmasters can take steps to improve their score.
Some ways that you can improve page speed on your website includes reviewing the size of your images and ensuring that the images are not too large. You can also look to remove any redundant CSS code that is playing no part in the function or design of your website. Excess code is often present in pre-made templates and this can slow down the loading speed of a website.
Otherwise, if your website is still loading slowly then there are other factors that can impact it such as your hosting service or even the browser or internet provider that users are accessing the website with.
To have the best chance of a speedy website, you should review the content, images and code within it to consider whether you can reduce load time yourself. Before investigating the other factors such as hosting.
It’s easy to bypass speed for a website that looks aesthetically pleasing, but it’s no good having a well-designed website if it doesn’t function properly. From both an SEO perspective and a user perspective, it is imperative that you have a fast loading website. Failure to do so can have a negative impact on both your organic rankings and on the overall ROI and performance of your business.
For further advice on fine-tuning your website to load faster, get in touch with the team at Varn to see how we can help you.
