Many websites today perform poorly when it comes to page speed, which has a direct impact on their revenue. There are many things we can do as digital marketers, and there is never enough time to do them all.
Website page speed is an important factor in digital marketing today. It can impact how long visitors stay on your site and consequently affects the conversions. It also has a significant effect on your organic ranking.
One of the things that we often miss out on is optimizing page speed. This is mainly because most people don't understand it’s importance. So, they don't see the value of spending time and money on improving it!
Since Google considers page speed as one of their ranking factors, it is important to optimize it to see improvements in your keyword rankings and to give a better user experience on your site!
What is page speed?
Page Speed is the amount of time that it takes for a web page to load. A page's loading speed is determined by several different factors, including a site's server, page file size, and image compression. Source
It is the time taken between clicking on the link and displaying the entire content from the web page on the browser. Let us dig into the three core aspects necessary to understand page speed in the context of user experience and website performance:
- The closer the distance is between the user and the server hosting the website, the faster the speed will be. Here is a guide demonstrating how to pick the best server location depending on your targetted market.
- The time that is taken in delivering the requested material along with the accompanying HTML content onto the browser.
- The browser's response to these load requests.
- The ultimate observational measure of page load speed is the view of end-users as the requested web page performs on the browser.
Website performance has a significant impact on search engine rankings that are developed under undisclosed algorithms, incorporating key factors like page speed, user experience, website responsiveness, and many other metrics.
Focusing on page speed is a critical principle for maximizing website performance. There are several reasons why a page is loading slowly, such as unnecessary redirects, unoptimized content, server configuration, CSS, JavaScript, etc. Page Speed Insights is a free tool provided by Google, where you can analyze the performance of your website on both mobile and desktop.
What Is a Good Page Speed Score?
Over the years, there have been many changes to the internet world with innovations in communication and networking technologies. These variations have revolutionized the transmission of digital information across the internet.
So, anything less than a blink of an eye is said to be slow. Engineers at Google discovered that the barely perceptible page load time 0.4 seconds is enough to make users search less!
The next generation of businesses have every resource they require to deliver content on the spot. Still, to make use of these resources to its full potential, businesses need speed-optimized websites that will provide the best user experience.
How to Improve Page Speed?
If the website is taking more than 4 seconds to load, 1 in 4 visitors will abandon the site. The majority of visitors do not revisit poorly performing websites. Website owners will get 5 seconds to engage their visitors before they consider leaving. A good percentage of users accessing the mobile site will leave if it takes more than 5 seconds to load.
So, how do we get this whole page speed issue under control?
Here is an infographic designed to show you the best practices to boost your page load speed. This cheat sheet is a must for internet marketers who are looking to improve their site's performance and, subsequently, it's ranking. We use this practice, and it helps us optimize our clients' websites. Metrics like 'time on site' will increase, and the bounce rate will consequently decrease. You will see a significant improvement in your conversions too.
Website load speed has a direct impact on business growth and it can be measured, especially when you have a high number of unique visitors using your site. Page speed is a crucial factor for any business when you consider the growth and competition in both ecommerce and lead-gen businesses.
We’ve included every possible optimization tips for a fast loading website. But a question to our readers, what techniques do you use when optimizing a website? Please share if you have any ideas other than what we’ve covered in the checklist.
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[…] your current server or switching over to a new website host will improve your website’s speed, which could improve your website’s current […]
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Your work is amazing and the majority of the people are taking advantage of it. Thank you.
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Great infographic with great tips. Page speed is obviously important and it’s time everyone to finally optimize their pages.
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Good article, Page speed has become integral part of user experience so having low load time definitely improves your SERP, I suggest wordpress users to try pagespeed ninja plugin to increase their site speed. It helps by compressing js, css and images.
Jack from Piqued Digi Media
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Great post…we have had trouble with site speed with a previous captcha. Got it taken care of use MaxCDN now. Good work guys
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This is a very good post to learn how to optimize web load speed. I really liked the infographic. If a page takes more than a couple of seconds to load, I’ll propbably try elsewhere, it’s really annoying.
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Nice post with the infographic. Very useful information.
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Unique
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These are great tips! I’m going to give this infographic to our programmers. It can serve as their checklist as they are now in the final stages of developing a website. 🙂 Thank you!!
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I like infographics. It makes me understand things much better for some reason. I have a question: how much of an impact does a webpage load speed have on SEO?
By the way, I read somewhere that the use of infographics help with SEO. Is that correct? If so, how? It’s just an image…
Thanks for the tips!
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No one knows exactly how much speed helps with SEO. Google doesn’t disclose anything about their algorithm. But if you think about the user experience, site speed plays a big part, so therefor it must be an SEO factor.
Infographics help with SEO because they build links.
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Speed is indeed very important, and I often find myself bouncing from sites that lack it.
Also the infographic is really nice for showing how to make improvements in a handy!
Very informative article and way to go presenting it in a infographic instead of writing it in point form, the inforgraphic is way more entertaining and fun to read!
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Are the above techniques feasible for mobile site also? I think other mobile site optimization techns are missing here.
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@Sam. Please share any we missed!
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Ah, a one stop solution for all. I like that, now I don’t need to Google it every time. This will be very helpful for my development team.
Cheers!
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This is great information for people that are looking to start a website or looking for help on how to improve their current site.
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Oh, what a handy infographic. Hope some site owners take heed, even with my hi-speed internet connection some sites load painfully slowly. Some excellent tips you’ve got there 🙂
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Even if your internet speed is fast, your site will still be slower to other sites in comparison.
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this is a great help for my blog…it sometimes gets really slow and i think its because all the stuff i put on it. 🙂
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I have been to website’s before and I am unimpressed with site’s load speed on occasion. I run blogs on the internet and when my site had a WordPress CSS, i run wp-super cache. It can also be very informative to your users to write a article to increase your users browsers speed by refreshing their cache and deleting their cookies so they can load web pages at a quicker rate.
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Speed has been king for a very long time. Even when I was making hundreds of sites I used as landing pages for PPC, I would always do whatever I can to make them load as quickly as possible.
This is probably one of the most underrated aspects of SEO and just page building in general. If people find you in organic search or click on a PPC ad, and your page takes too long to load, they will simply just hit the back button and choose the next option.
High ranking web pages can lose 50% or more of their viewers just by being slow. Since it has also become a key component of ranking, it is that much more important.
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Say no to spamming and no copy paste from other sites..Thus increase the sites credibility…
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Page speed matters a lot in the world when every one needs instant response/result for what they wanted. This includes the speed of web page on a click of the mouse.
In the present world, peole would not even trust a slow loading site.
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Great article.
Definitely something something people should keep in mind. If a site loads too slowly, it will reduce traffic.