On search engines like Google, it’s all about the website that’s delivering the most value to potential customers.
You may be offering the best, most informative content, phenomenal site architecture, optimized meta descriptions — but if your on-page and off-page SEO isn’t fully optimised, including your website performance in terms of speed, Google might strike you down on search results.
Why? Because it’s all about providing the best user experience to searchers.
If search engine users click on your website link and encounter slow load times and delayed navigation, your website is cursed with higher bounce rates (users leaving without clicking anywhere on your website).
To Google, that looks like low user utility and satisfaction, which means their algorithm now places you in a less desirable box, and demotes you on search engine rankings.
Read on if you want to cover all bases for your SEO, drive high-quality traffic. We’ll briefly dive into each of the technical aspects that can amp up your website’s speed and search engine rankings.
The Importance of Website Speed
It’s competitive out there. Unless your website is performing great, search engine algorithms will kick you down.
A decade or so ago, you could get away with offering an average website. Today, web users are used to faster load times, have short attention spans, and are highly demanding. Website speed (for the user clicking through your website) is one of the most important aspects that can optimize search engine rankings.
For the google algorithm, site speed is one of the many signals that allow it to class you as a great source of information — which means greater SEO, higher rankings… and traffic, traffic, traffic.
And that’s not all. Because faster load times are convenient for the user, they’ll want to stick around and check your content, or look through your product/service. A greater user experience equals paying customers. If you’re slow, they’ll bounce.
How to Evaluate Your Website’s Speed
If you’re on board to optimize your website for speed, start by assessing its current performance. My favorite tools to use are Google’s PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom. These three are highly intuitive and useful tools that thoroughly analyze factors related to speed on your website, evaluate user experience, and provide an in-depth report of website speed and related factors.
The 8 Technical Aspects of Speed Optimization
Let’s look at eight technical aspects that can drastically affect your website speed. These are quick to implement, do not require a lot of maintenance, and can be among the very first steps toward transforming user experience on your website.
It’s all about giving searchers a great experience, so they’ll navigate through your website, ultimately signalling to the algorithm: ‘hey, this website’s great! I’m finding it valuable.’
Enough similar interactions of your website with Google searcher, and the algorithm now views you as a prime source of information that deserves a higher spot on search result pages. Cool, right?
- Optimize Your Images
How do images affect your website speed? Images are often consuming a massive portion of downloaded bytes when loading a webpage. Larger image sizes and way too many of those images can delay load times.
With user tastes now more refined than ever before, even a fraction of a second of delay can make them bounce. The dilemma is, you still need images to optimize your webpage, so how to eradicate this problem?
Bite-sized images are your best bet to turn things around. Turn to image compression tools that can drastically cut the file size — without negatively affecting image quality.
You should consider a culture of lazy loading, which means you only place images where absolutely needed. This can significantly affect your website speed.
- Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
The process of minifying is actually the removal of cleaning up your site’s code. How do you do it? Remove unnecessary characters such as dashes, spaces, and commas from your code. When these extras are reduced, your page size gets drastically smaller in size — as a result, greater website speed.
- Use Browser Caching
How does that work, you ask? Basically, browsers cache (or store) on-page information, so when a user returns, it doesn’t have to reload the whole page from scratch. Browsers will usually cache stylesheets, images, JavaScript files, and more, which stay even if they’re not needed anymore.
I recommend a tool like YShow, which will reveal if you’ve set a day for your cache to expire and start fresh. If you discover you don’t, try turning on an expiration date for ‘static components,’ and your web site speed will thank you.
- Implement Gzip Compression
Gaining bullet speed on site speed is all about condensing things and making things smaller so they don’t require a lot of effort to load. I recommend implementing Gzip, which is a method of file compression that facilitates faster network transfers.
With the size of your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files drastically reduced, you’re setting the stage for a better user experience in terms of site speed. Most web servers today compress files into Gzip before forwarding them for download. This can be a built-in feature, or may employ a third party module to get the job done.
- Leverage a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
CDNs are globally placed networks of servers, which keep a copy of your site. When a user anywhere in the world attempts to access your website, they will receive the copy on the server that’s closest to them.
This geographical proximity enhances load time, and speed. Leveraging a CDN could be one of the many great ways to foster a high-quality user experience that can be translated to better search engine rankings.
- Enable HTTP Keep-Alive
HTTP Keep-Alive is the communication between a PC and a web server — where the PC requests permission to download a file. Faster or less frequent communication required can improve page speed.
When you enable Keep-Alive, the PC can swiftly access and download all the files it requires without constantly having to communicate with the web server, and repeatedly request access and permission.
- Prioritize Above-the-Fold Content (Critical Rendering Path)
To eliminate render-blocking of JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content, you will need to prioritize visible content. A standard way to go about achieving this is to ensure your HTML is structured to load crucial and important above-the-fold content before diving into the rest.
- Reduce Redirects
Every time your webpage redirects the visitor to another page, it requires more time as it awaits completion of the HTTP request-response cycle. Attempt to limit the number of page redirects to amp up site speed.
Author’s Final Note
Amplifying website speed by enhancing user experience will make significant improvements to your search engine rankings.
Although we covered some basic and advanced strategies to boost site speed, it’s important to remember that each website is unique and may require customized strategies to get the results you desire.
When we talk about website performance, it’s all about creating a tailored plan for every specific website.
To truly emerge as an SEO and site speed winner, and drive results on search engine result pages, it’s all about consistent maintenance and effort — test, modify, and optimize.