Website Speed Invigorates the Site Rankings

Website Speed Invigorates the Site Rankings

The Google SERPs have evolved with time. It has been constantly improving its algorithm to categorize sites according to the relevance of keywords and other minor factors taken into account. Website speed is one of them. Website speed’s relevance to improve the search rankings may sound suspicious. To be precise; it does impact (even though minor) your ranking on Google.

But the question is, how?

The metric that you use to rationalize website speed highly influences the results. For example, if you consider the time taken to load the first page, it turns to be a massive influence because sites that load the first page faster; typically stand-out higher in Google. When another metric, for instance the time required to load the leading content or the time it takes to load the complete page (with pictures and advertisements) are taken into account, the things change. As these two factors are not that imperative to Google.

Overall, it is believed that website speed has about 1- 2% effect on rankings. Many websites find an increase in traffic after optimizing their site for speed. This gives an eminent reason to do so for your users, your traffic and your conversions. Website speed is the key for user experience as customers will leave the website if it hangs them for over 10 seconds.
What should be done to improve Website Speed?

There are certain steps to be taken to improve the website speed. But first, you should measure your website to know if it is slow.

1. Measure the Load Times:
You need a good tool to measure load times. Pingdom Page Load Time Tool and Google Analytics Site Speed give a fair idea of your site’s common performance. WebPageTest is an advanced tool to verify your site speed in different browsers and find the slow areas of your site. Good tools measure not only the typical site speed but also elements, such as user time, time to fully load, first byte, JavaScript files, etc., that are valuable to fix the problematic areas.

2. Try a Faster Server:
The server on which you are hosting a site may make it slow. The reasons may vary: it might be a web hosting provider lacking the capacity to offer fast servers or the type of your hosting account.
You may upgrade your account to get a solution to this. For instance if you have a huge site with many pages and still using a shared account your solution is to upgrade from a shared account to VPS (Virtual Private Server) or a dedicated server. The VPS may cost you higher than what you are paying for your shared account per month but that will ultimately bring returns to your business.

3.Optimize your site’s code and images:
If your site itself is slow, it will affect the speed even though the server is fast. If your code and images are not enhanced for fast loading, your website will sweep. This may take time, but you have to do it. Images can be compressed to small sizes. For JavaScript, CSS, PHP, HTML and other languages there are many tools to optimize your code.

Website speed does not majorly impact the search engine rankings but still it counts! Slow sites can kill the business being non user friendly- ultimately resulting into low conversions. Take time to fix the speed issues of the site, to get paid in long run!