Page Speed and SEO
Google, Yahoo and Bing want to give you, the user the best experience they can with every search that you make. They want you to stay a loyal user of their search engine. They don’t want you having a bad experience and heading over to the competition.
Search engines are big business, and the more users they have clicking on their ads the more money they make. The more users using their site, the more users they have paying for ads to edge out the competition. SEO is a competitive business and you need to be on top of your game.
Organic search is complicated business these days and no longer just a matter of plugging in a few keywords. User Experience is now part of the standard of which your website is measured. A fast loading web page means a better experience for the user. Not to mention that fast web pages are less likely to have a high bounce rate. Which reduces the ping-pong effect.
How many times have you clicked the back button because you couldn’t be bothered waiting for a website to load?
If you want to check the site speed of your site Google has made this really easy with the Page Speed Insights tool.
Search Engine Optimisation is more human-centric than ever before. Google has trained its crawlers and bots to understand the human experience not just crawl for keywords and code. The best way to optimise your site and individual pages is to make it a great experience for humans. We still need to take into consideration that bots are trawling for keywords and indicators of what you are about but…
Humans first, Bots second.
Page speed can be a tricky one, because firstly a designer who is all about visuals was probably in charge of how your site was going to look. Sometimes a beautiful site can be mind numbingly slow making it a horrible user experience. Your beautiful site won’t even get a look in if 90% of your users are pressing the back button before your home page even finishes loading. A good web designer will make sure they take page speed into consideration during the design process.
So if you have a slow page speed what can you do? Ask your web design professional to consider the following:
- Optimise images
- Improve server response time
- Check browser caching
- Reduce any redirects
- Enable compression
With mobile browsing being one of the main sources of web traffic a fast website is a must!