Page loading speed has become an important part of SEO. By focusing more on the speed of your website, you may start to boost your search rankings.
Search engines use a wide assortment of data to determine page rankings for search results. The biggest factors that affect your SEO include the relevance of your content to the search query, backlinks, and the overall user experience provided by your web pages.
To provide a quality user experience, you need mobile-friendly designs and fast loading pages. The page speed has become an increasingly important part of SEO best practices.
It should not come as a surprise that the page speed is an important part of search rankings. Google has slowly placed more focus on the mobile user experience. Businesses and marketing experts slowly watched as mobile-friendly web pages outperform non-optimized pages.
If you want to climb the search engine rankings, you should focus more on page speed.
Understanding Your Page Speed Measurements
The first step to using page speed to your advantage is to understand the way that Google measures this metric. Luckily, Google provides you with a useful tool for evaluating your page loading speed.
Using the Google PageSpeed Insights tool, you can keep track of the performance of your web pages. Insights provide more insight into two specific areas – optimization and page speed.
Optimization refers to the checklist that Google provides after analyzing your web page. The page speed refers to how quickly your web page loads.
The page loading speed is also divided into two categories. The first category is first content paint (FCP). With FCP, Google measures how long it takes for a user to see the first visual element of the page.
The second category is DOM-content loaded (DCL). With DCL, Google measures how long it takes for the HTML file to load.
Analyzing Chrome User Experience Statistics
Google uses several sets of data to determine your page speed, including lab data and field data. The lab data includes the true loading speed of the web page. The field data represents the user experience of your visitors. The page speed is one of the details included in the chrome user experience (CrUX) reports.
You can analyze the loading speed using any online page speed testing tool. However, you need to access the CrUX database to analyze the user experience.
The CrUX database provides insight into the performance of your web pages. Instead of basing the page speed on the server response times, the database analyzes the loading time for individual users.
If you want to access this data, you need to create a project using the Google Cloud Platform. You also need to understand some basic SQL queries. You may want to consider hiring an SEO company to help you with these steps.
Besides analyzing the page loading time for your website visitors, you can find other valuable information from the CrUX database. You can find out what types of devices and internet connections your visitors are using.
Improving Your Web Page Optimization Scores
The optimization score is one of the two metrics that you can view through the Google PageSpeed Insights tool. Google grades your web pages and assigns optimization scores. A high score is directly linked to higher search rankings.
Luckily, Google offers recommendations for dealing with issues that lower the web page optimization score. Some of the problems that may cause you to get a lower score include landing page redirects and caching policies.
If you want to increase your loading times, avoid using redirects for your landing pages. These redirects slow the loading time for both mobile and desktop users.
The images that you use on your web page may also result in slower speeds. For the average webpage, images comprise almost 60% of the data downloaded to the user’s browsers. By using smaller images and enabling compression, you can reduce the file sizes of these images.
The response time of the servers that your web hosting company uses may also affect the page speed. If you get a low server response time score, you may need to switch hosting companies or hosting plans. For example, shared hosting plans may cause slower server response times when another site sharing the same server receives a lot of traffic.
A caching policy may also improve page speeds. If a user needs to download every image, CSS file, and resource each time the page refreshes or they visit another page within your site, the pages will take longer to load. With a caching policy, images that appear on every page can be stored in the visitors’ browser, resulting in faster loading times.
You should also ensure that your CSS is loaded before the page is rendered. If you use a lot of external stylesheets, additional server requests are needed to load the page, resulting in a slower page loading speed.
Keep in mind that these changes are not always easy to implement. You may need to overhaul your entire website to fully optimize each page. However, page speed now needs to be part of any effective SEO strategy.
Last Thoughts on the Importance of Page Speed
Google has slowly shifted the priorities for determining search rankings to focus more on the user experience. If your web pages take too long to load, they may not appear at the top of the search results pages.
Working with an SEO company in Bangkok can help you analyze and improve your page speeds, which should also help boost your search rankings.
There are many solutions for optimizing the loading speed of your web pages. You can optimize the images on your pages so they take less time to download. You can also remove unnecessary widgets, plugins, or add-ons. You may even need to switch to a different hosting provider.
While Google makes a lot of changes to their search algorithms each year, page speed and the overall user experience provided by your website are likely to remain crucial factors.
If you want to secure the top spot on search results pages and gain more web traffic, you need to ensure that your web pages load quickly.
