Why Page Speed Is Crucial for SEO (How to Enhance It)
No one would love to spend a long time waiting for a website to load. In the absence of fast loading speed, a user will immediately move to a competitor website. Slow loading websites are major nuisance for users. Moreover, they always get poor ranking in the search engine results. Therefore, you must take some necessary steps to enhance the page speed of your site.
What Is Page Speed?
Indeed, page speed is referred to the amount of time a page requires to be completely loaded.
There can be various reasons your website is loading slowly such as poor hosting, server location, poor internet connection speed, extra large images, render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content, too many file requests, etc.
Why Page Speed Matters
There are several reasons you should make effort to speed up your website. The first reason is that users would love to stay on your site if it is loading fast. The second is, Google has started penalizing websites that load slowly. The 3rd and most important reason is that faster loading site triggers more leads and offer more conversion.
Why Page Speed Matters to Google
In 2010, the leading search engine, Google announced that page loading speed would be count as ranking factor. Since then, website owners have been focusing on improving delivery of the content. Google has made it important for every website owner that they provide the best on-site user experience to their audience.
Google has been prioritizing site speed as ranking factor so that web users can get excellent experience while internet surfing.
How to Improve Your Website Page Load Speed
As page loading speed keeps so much important from both search engine point of view and user experience, you should not ignore any fault or issue that can prevent your web page from loading quickly. Below are few issues that are notorious for causing slow website loading speed.
Eliminate Render-Blocking JavaScript and CSS
Sometimes, CSS and JavaScript intercept your site from loading quickly. Indeed, when a browser loads a web page, JavaScript and CSS prevent the web page from loading, until they are downloaded and processed by the browser, resulting in a slow website loading. It can be a worse experience for your users.
Most WordPress site owners, use Autoptimize plugin and W3 Total Cache plugin to eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS. If you don’t know how to get rid of this error, read a resourceful post on how to eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content at 000webhost.com.
USE Content Delivery Network
If you run a website that serves a global audience you must give a try to content delivery network to enhance the speed of your site. CDN speeds up website performance by minimizing the distance between your audience and your server. It stores a cached version of its content in multiple geographical locations. CDN helps your users receive content from the server that is adjacent to their geographical location. In actual, Content delivery network caches your website on a network of server
Avoid Unnecessary Use of Text Graphics
Many website owners prefer to use images to display text. Sometimes, it can give birth to slow loading website issue as well. If your website is having a lot of graphics in the first fold. For example, you are using images to display a logo or you have explainer test on your homepage, they can prevent your site from loading fast.
Since these graphics can take a lot longer time, it is better to use a simple fonts for graphics wherever is possible.
Optimize Your Images & Videos
There is no doubt that images and videos bring life to your website, but they can also be responsible for slowing down your website, especially if they are not optimized for speed properly.
Make selective use of GIF, PNG and JPG files to cut down the size of your website. Choose a useful image editing tool to compress the images uploaded on your site. Always choose a tool that does not decrease the quality of the image after reducing the size. Some of the popular free image optimization tools are Optimizilla, ImageRecycle, Compress Now, Online Image Optimizer, etc.
Check out some image optimization tips to speed up your site.
- Give your image a descriptive name.
- Reduce the size of your images outside the website. It means you should upload the image of accurate size, instead of setting the image size-ratio within the website after uploading the image.
- You can use image sitemaps.
- Avoid decorative images.
- Choose the right file type.
Avoid Too Many Plugins
If you are running a WordPress site, most probably you have installed plenty of plugins to bring different functionalities to your site. However, you must remember that each plugin you install on your site makes its own file request. Moreover, these plugins also have CSS files and JavaScripts to load. So, avoid installing unnecessary plugins. Also, make sure all the plugins installed on your site are of current versions.
How to Check Your Page Load Speed
Nowadays, checking your website’s load speed is a piece of cake. There are plenty of tools available that can load your website from multiple geographical locations and tell you exactly how long your site takes to load.
Even some tools can disclose possible causes slowing down your website. From bad CSS to poor theme, to uncompressed images, these tools can list most of the factors that are preventing your site from loading quickly. Let’s take a look at some popular page speed checking tools below-
It is a popular and absolutely free tool from Google itself. It offers a comprehensive report on page load issues. It is competent to list all of the common factors that can prevent your site from loading fast such as bad CSS, Uncompressed images, etc.
It is another popular tool which you can use to analyze the loading speed of your site. It offers a lot of optimization data in the form of graphs. You can easily find the files causing slow load speed.
This easy to use tool helps you run a speed test from multiple locations across the globe using real browsers. To use this tool, you just need to select a location and browser and hit on ‘Start Test’ button.
Optimizing your website loading speed can be proved one of your best SEO practices to get good ranking in search engine results. So, don’t ignore it.
The post Why Page Speed Is Crucial for SEO (How to Enhance It) appeared first on Home Business Magazine.
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