Finally, after many months of design and iteration, toil, blood, sweat and tears, your website is out there ready to get your brand recognised and money in your pocket. The design is airtight, all the right things are in the right places – all you have to do is sit back and wait for the leads to come streaming in….right?
Until you realise…it isn’t loading as quickly as you’d like. In fact, it’s actually quite slow. What do you do? Try your luck and hope that people are patient enough to give it time? If that option sounds enticing, then think again. This is the internet – people are not patient online! Some studies even put the number at around eight seconds! That’s eight seconds MAX before you need to be providing customers with the information they came for. But why is this such an important matter for you and your brand?
Turns out that loading speed is just as important as the content within it, so much so that Google itself takes it into consideration when ranking websites on its search engine results page (SERP). Fear not, however, all your hard work on creating and designing your website isn’t for naught. But before we discuss how you can help decrease your website’s loading time, let’s see what it all means.
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Page speed vs. site speed
From the get-go, it’s important to mention that there are two aspects of speed to take note of – site speed and page speed. Although steeped in technicality, page speed is actually fairly straight forward on the surface. Page speed basically refers to the amount of time it takes for the aspects of your website – on one particular page – to load and present itself to an online user. This can be measured in different ways:
Time to first byte – the time it takes for the loading process of the site to begin.
First meaningful/contextual paint – the time it takes for enough legible material to load
Fully loaded page – the time it takes for the entire page to load
Each of these metrics are important as each other as they provide a unique insight into different aspects of your site as well as how visitors interact with it. For example, if you have a blog site that appears to have a high bounce rate then it’s worth looking at each of these metrics to understand what is causing it.
Outside of this, however, you also have site speed which judges the speed at which the entire site itself loads from the SERP. As you imagine, sit speed has significant impact on the experience of users heading to your site, as it is the difference between an easy loading experience and a loathsome patience-testing one – or in business terms, the difference between a happily paying customer and a potential customer lost to your competitors.
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How can I determine my website page speed?
If you’re reading this, then you’re already on the right path to achieving your SEO goals, but read on to understand how you can improve your SEO ranking with page and site speed improvements.
Like the rest of us, you’re probably looking to claim that high ranking on Google, but to do so you will need to ensure that your page competes with those already in that top ten spot of the Google SERPs – which means they’re already at an advantage! Fear not, though, page speed isn’t always at the top of many people’s priorities so this could be the time to sweep in and undercut your competitors in a space where they didn’t even realise they needed to be competing in.
Obviously, your website assets aren’t the only thing that affects speed. There are many exterior factors that can affect page speed such as internet connection, your internet service provider (ISP), the processing power of your computer, the type of browser you’re looking for, and even how many apps are running on your device. And with these aspects, we can only maintain so much control – so do what you can with these elements and then focus on working on your site.
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Similarly, there are matters of which device you’re using that has an effect on bounce rate. The annoying irony of page speed is that an increasing number of web users are mobile-first, meaning that they are visiting more and more sites from their phones rather than a desktop.
However, mobiles are also generally slower due to the fact that they often run on mobile data networks such as 3G or 4G – the former of which is generally accepted to be unusably slow by today’s standards. To put it into numbers, over half (53%) of site visits are abandoned the loading takes over 3 seconds. And another half expect pages to load within 2 seconds, So, as you can tell there is a high expectation from mobile users for one thing – speed, speed, and more speed.
Before you can even think about changing up your site to encourage faster speeds, you need to undertake some kind of analysis to know better what is going on with your site. Luckily, there are many ways in which you can diagnose the speed of your website, and a simple Google search will show you the various tools that offer basic web performance metrics as well as page speed insights. Often, these tests determine what is going well so far, and what needs to be improved.
This will give you indispensable information about what you need to do to improve your website’s speed and get on the road to Page One of Google – from file size, to code info, you’ll have all the knowledge you need to get going.
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