It’s but natural to be proud of a website that looks great on any screen size. Aside from being visually stunning, it also has compelling content.
From the way things look, you have a website that has it all.
However, once it goes live and you try to access it, the page you’re trying to open takes a long time to load fully. You give other pages a try, and the result is the same.
In a world where speed in just about anything is crucial, slow-loading pages are the bane of many a webmaster.
Whatever SEO solution you’ve incorporated into your website, your page speed will play a crucial role in your optimization efforts' success or failure.
Page Speed Is A Ranking Factor
One of the primary reasons page speed influences your site’s visibility in the search engines is that Google has long declared it a direct ranking factor.
In 2018, Google even doubled down on its preference for faster page speeds by factoring in mobile as well.
With slow-loading pages, search engines will end up crawling fewer pages of your site, which will have a direct effect on their indexation.
Fewer pages crawled means fewer pages indexed, which reduces your site's likelihood of getting ranked for particular keywords.
When your pages aren’t ranking at all, your visibility in the search engines goes down, too.
Page Speed Affects The User Experience
Internet users these days are an impatient lot.
Not too long ago, a web page that took six to seven seconds to load in full was good enough.
Today, users expect a page to load in three seconds or less.
A page that takes far too long to load can already ruin the user experience.
People won’t have any second thoughts about closing a sluggish page and moving on to speedier ones of other sites.
Slow pages lead to lower average time on page and higher bounce rates, both of which can negatively affect your SEO.
Given Google’s current emphasis on providing everyone a great user experience, the search engine giant isn’t likely to rank sites that provide the opposite.
When few to none of your pages rank for certain keywords, you cannot expect your site to become visible in search results.
Ways To Improve Page Speed
Given how much influence page speed wields on the visibility of your website, doing what you can to make your pages load faster is of paramount importance.
Some of the things you can do to speed up your pages include:
● Optimizing images
● Minimizing or eliminating the use of custom fonts
● Implementing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) on your pages
● Upgrading to faster hosting
● Activating browser caching
Speed is everything in today’s world. People neither have the time nor the patience to wait long for the content you promised them to show up. Speed up your pages now to increase their chances of appearing in search results so you can benefit from that kind of visibility.
About The Author
Shawn Byrne is the founder and CEO of SEOPhoenix.net. Shawn started his career in I.T. troubleshooting workstations, servers and networks, then went on to doing SEO as a side project and quickly found success in ranking websites. It was easy for him to grasp not only the algorithms but also the technical side which most SEO strategists miss and neglect because of its complexities. SEO Phoenix then grew based on its own rankings and referrals.