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Have you ever visited a website that was extremely slow? What impression did this leave on you? Did you even stay on the website to find out the information that you wanted?
I’m sure you have been told that your website needs to be fast for search engine optimization. This is absolutely true information, having a fast website does assist with increasing your SEO score. But why?
It isn’t some esoteric technical reason. It isn’t because search engines make up new ways to increase the work of marketing companies. At the end of the day it is all about engagement. Every search engine is a business and they make more money when more and more people engage with their platform.
Thus, if you have a slow website it lowers engagement. Did you know that 50% of internet users expect a website page to load in 2 seconds or less? So, search engines decided to make it part of their algorithm.
How to determine your speed?
As we discussed above, search engines are all about engagement and part of Google’s engagement comes from all the different businesses using their platform.
Therefore they decided to make a few tools that businesses can use to measure their website speed.
Google Analytics – Check out the Site speed reports
Why use Google’s tools? Why not use tools made by other companies? Simple answer. What do you think Google uses to rank your website? Google uses their own tools and so should you.
The information you get is also useful and if you do address the issues it will increase your website speed.
Additional Reasons for Speed
As discussed earlier in this article, the need for speed is about engagement, but let’s break this down even further.
The User Experience
In 2021 internet users want instant gratification. People don’t have the patience to wait for even 5 seconds for a website to load.
To ensure the user experience of your clients/customers or potential clients/customers coming to your website is enjoyable, the website speed is important.
The average internet usage today is just under 7 hours a day. If your website page is taking more than 3 seconds, that person will bounce off your website and find another that doesn’t take so long.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is incredibly important for every business. Having a slow website will lower your SEO score.
Conversions
This is pretty obvious. If someone doesn’t stay on your website because it is too slow, you will not get them to convert.
A website is a virtual representation of your company and slow websites leave bad impressions.
Browser Caching
A cache is a secondary memory storage space on a computer.
Meaning browsers will store specific files on your local computer from different website pages.
Website Pages share many different resource files and when these are cached on your computer it helps to load some website pages faster.
If you can leverage browser caches, this can help you to speed up loading time.
Images
The larger the size of images on your website, the longer it will take to load your website. Period.
The best file types to use for a website is WebP. They compress the best. We highly recommend that you use this for your photos.
HTML, CSS & JavaScript
Websites in their simplicity are composed of code. And whether you realize it or not, there can be unnecessary code that is not needed for execution.
If you don’t know coding, we highly suggest that you hire a web developer to get this done. It doesn’t have to be a lot of work, but very necessary.
Server Response
Every website on the internet is located on a server somewhere in the world. If that server has a slow response to request from a browser, it can significantly slow down loading time.
A server should respond to a request from a browser in under 200 milliseconds. There are many different reasons for slow response – slow application logic, slow database queries, slow routing, frameworks, libraries, resource CPU starvation or memory starvation.
These need to be inspected and handled as necessary to speed up server response.
Landing Page Redirects
Having too many redirects to a landing page can create a redirect loop that takes time to get through and to the actual page.
Just have one actual URL address for your landing pages.
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