SEO basics are just that, basic. Do what you can to speed your site up. Find ways to make it faster. If you are on WordPress, limit the number of plugins you use and test different themes.
You don’t need to see a multivariant study to know this is true. Instead, you need to keep one simple principle in mind that I will tell you over and over again.
Make the experience good for the user and Google (along with other engines) will bring users to your website.
-Me
In this article, we will explore why site speed is essential for SEO and provide tips on optimizing your website to improve its speed. Let’s start by looking at some of the reasons why speed matters for your users regarding SEO.
Why Site Speed Matters for SEO
Site speed is critical for SEO for several reasons, including the following:
- User Experience The primary reason why site speed matters for SEO is user experience. If your website takes too long to load, 40 out of 100 people will leave your site looking for an alternative and will not return. According to several websites, users expect pages to load within 2 seconds; and while I could not find a source for this statement, it makes sense.
If users continually leave your site due to slow page speed, it will negatively impact your bounce rate, dwell time, and overall user engagement. As a result, Google will likely interpret these user signals as a sign that your site is not providing a positive user experience, ultimately leading to lower search rankings.
- Mobile Optimization Site speed is particularly important for mobile optimization. Mobile devices typically have less processing power and slower internet connections than desktops leading to a magnification of any existing issues. Additionally, as mobile search grows, Google increasingly emphasizes mobile optimization and site speed.
On many sites, especially those selling something from social media ads or those centered around non-business topics, I regularly see 90% or greater mobile users.
- Search Engine Crawling and Indexing Site speed can also affect how search engine bots crawl and index your site. Slow-loading pages can result in incomplete or truncated crawls, preventing search engines from indexing your site’s content meaning pages or entire sections of your site will be skipped.
Now that we have established a few of the reasons you should be paying attention to site speed for SEO let’s dive into some tips on optimizing your website to improve its speed.
Improving Your Site Speed
- Optimize Your Images Images are often a significant contributor to slow site speeds, and optimizing your images to reduce their file size without sacrificing quality is essential. You can achieve this by compressing your images, reducing their dimensions, and using the correct file format (JPEG, PNG, or GIF).
There are several tools available to help you optimize your images, such as Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, and online image compressors, that can be used for free or a small fee. I use Imagify and WP-Rocket when my sites are new and too small to put advertisements on them. Imagify shrinks the image to the absolute smallest value current technology will allow. WP-Rocket (specifically only talking about the image side of things right now) servers the best image size for the browser and device accessing the site.
I will have a full guide to image compression that I will post soon.
- Minimize HTTP Requests HTTP requests are made every time a user loads a page on your website, and the more HTTP requests a page requires, the longer it will take to load. Therefore, minimizing the number of HTTP requests your website makes is essential.
You can achieve this by combining multiple style sheets and scripts into a single file, reducing the number of images on your pages, and using CSS sprites to combine multiple images into a single file. I currently use WP-Rocket’s features to preform these tasks. Again, I will use this product until my site is large enough for advertising. Then, I will use Ezoic’s optimization features along with their advertising to monitzie my sites.
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) A CDN is a network of servers that are distributed across different geographic locations. They work by caching your site’s content on servers closer to the user, which can help reduce your site’s load time.
By using a CDN, your site’s content can be delivered from the server that is closest to the user, which can significantly reduce the load time of your pages. Additionally, a CDN can help reduce the load on your web hosting server, improving your site’s speed and performance.
Several CDN providers are available, including Cloudflare, BunnyCDN, MaxCDN, and Amazon CloudFront. I will have some guides for each of these coming, as right now, I’m using and comparing them all.
This site is currently using a combination of Cloudflare and BunnyCDN (WP-Rocket makes this integration easy).
- Reduce Server Response Time Server response time is the amount of time it takes for your server to respond to a user’s request. A slow server response time can significantly impact your site’s speed and performance.
To improve your server response time, you can optimize your website’s code and database, reduce the number of HTTP requests, and use a caching plugin or tool. Additionally, you may want to consider upgrading your web hosting plan or switching to a faster hosting provider.
If you follow my server response time guide or your host doesn’t give you easy access to make the changes needed, this is one of the times I consider moving hosts. Read “Why I Don’t Like to Move” if you want to understand why moving providers can be a pain and should be left to professionals or avoided.
- Use Browser Caching Browser caching allows your site’s pages to be cached on a user’s browser, which can help reduce the load time of your pages on subsequent visits. By enabling browser caching, you can reduce the number of HTTP requests made by your site and improve your site’s speed and performance.
To enable browser caching, you can manually add a code snippet to your site’s .htaccess file, which will tell the browser how long to cache your site’s content. You can also use a caching plugin or tool to automate the process. I currently have several sites running for testing purposes and a future article about which is best.
- Minify Your Code Minification removes unnecessary characters from your website’s code, such as whitespace, comments, and line breaks. By minifying your code, you can reduce its file size and improve your site’s speed and performance.
Like many things on this list there are many ways to approach the problem. I recommend checking out my guide when I get it finished. Otherwise I’ll tell you simply the best luck I’ve had has been with WP-Rocket.
- Optimize Your CSS and JavaScript CSS and JavaScript are critical components of modern websites, but they can also significantly contribute to slow site speed. Therefore, optimizing your CSS and JavaScript to reduce their file size and improve your site’s speed and performance is essential.
Again this topic is very deep, but as mentioned above, minification is a start to the process of optimizing CSS and JavaScript. You can also dig deeper and see if you are using 3rd partly plugins on a WordPress site or any 3rd party JavaScript library on something more custom. How are these written? Are they efficiently executed?
Tools like Gulp or Grunt help automate the process of optimizing CSS and JavaScript for custom sites. WP-Rocket does some work in this area for WordPress sites.
Focus On The User
Optimizing your site speed can provide a fast and seamless user experience, which can ultimately lead to higher search rankings, increased traffic, and improved user engagement.
This becomes even more important when your goal is to get conversions, either product sales or user sign-ups. Which ultimately, all of this effects SEO. My mantra is SEO should actually be SUO, Sound User Optimization.