Analyze Page Speeds

Web Page Speed

What does the term “Page Speed” mean when evaluating SEO?

The term “page speed” relates to how fast content on a webpage takes to load on a website.

Search engines, like Google, monitor load times on webpages because this is a metric used in evaluating user experience.

The longer a webpage takes to load, the higher the likelihood a person will leave the site and go back and click on another website.

Since this result creates a bad user experience for a user, Google only wants to send people to websites that load quickly – thereby offering a better user experience.

This is why page speed is a ranking factor in search engine algorithms.

Also, with the majority of searches happening on mobile devices, Google has adopted a mobile-first approach to their products, services and algorithms in an effort to constantly improve the user experience and keep people coming back to their platforms.

Up until July 1st, 2019, Google’s indexing bots analyzed the desktop version of webpage content when evaluating its relevance to specific search queries.

After that date, they have shifted to “mobile-first indexing” which now analyzes the mobile version of webpage content first for indexing and ranking purposes.

Visit https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ to test your page speed using a free tool from Google.

This tool will provide details on a specific website (like the result for Apple’s UK website below):

Google Page Speed Test

Why is “Page Speed” important to optimize within an SEO strategy?

Based on their mobile-first approach to search, Google has suggested that quicker mobile load times (“page speed”) is a factor in determining organic rankings.

There are a variety of factors involved in Google’s ranking algorithms so the goal is to perform well across all ranking metrics to increase ranking within SERP’s and increase organic site visitors.

As a business owner, you want to ensure your website is optimized to load quickly to increase the chance of ranking well for keywords on your seed list.

How does Organix Digital analyze page speed?

Organix Digital will conduct a full site audit to uncover the ways your webmaster can optimize your site to increase page (or load) speed.

Additionally, we make recommendations in the following areas:

FILE COMPRESSION

Reduce the size of HTML, CSS and JavaScript files that are 150 bytes or larger.

CODE OPTIMIZATION

Remove spaces, commas, unnecessary characters, code comments, formatting, and unused code from your HTML, CSS and JavaScript code

DON’T BLOCK JAVASCRIPT

Web browsers (like Google) need to render HTML pages to properly display them, and blocking JavaScript slows down this process.

REDUCE OR ELIMINATE REDIRECTS

Redirects increase the time it takes to load a specific webpage, leading to higher bounce rates which search engines don’t like.

IMAGE OPTIMIZATION

Larger images and file types take longer to load, so using the right image files types for content is important. Graphics should use .png files and photographs should save to .jpg files. Images should also be compressed and implement CSS sprites to load images at once vs. sequentially.

To test your site’s page speed, use this link:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Additional Resources

Website Articles

Images

Google Page Speed Tool

Tools

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