Why Website Page Speed is Important in SEO?

When you create the first version of your website, you have a lot of elements you want to include. There are eye-catching images as big as the screen itself, and text in fancy font filling up the entire virtual real estate. Then, you realize no one is staying on your website. There may be a couple of factors affecting this, and one of the most significant is the page speed.

Poor User Experience

The speed at which your page loads determines the experience your visitors will have. Mind you, their attention span is really short, and if your page needs more than four seconds to load, you are losing out on significant conversion. According to Think with Google, a page load time increase from one second to three seconds means a 32% increase in probability of bounce. Take that from one to five seconds and the probability increases by 90%. Even the best SEO company in Hong Kong agrees, when you have millions of traffic, this is a lot of losses.

Ranking Factor

Google’s core web vitals looks at all the elements of your web page as a ranking factor. The first contentful paint, for instance, is when your browser renders the initial full information on your page, including background images. The largest contentful paint, on the other hand, measures how long it takes to load the largest information on the page. There’s also the cumulative layout shift, which determines how much of your elements shift around as they load. The first input delay is also considered. This refers to the response time of your page when a user first interact.

With all of these elements considered, Google determines which pages should rank higher because they are able to give a better user experience. If your web page elements move around and make it hard for users to remember where elements are, and if there is a substantial delay in loading elements on your website, the user might just look elsewhere for the information they need.

How You Can Increase Website Page Speed

Now that you know why website page speed is important in SEO, you’ll want to improve it as soon as possible. There are several things you can do:

• Choose a better hosting. Hosting may not seem like a big deal, but if you are using a shared host, remember that you may experience downtimes if another website sharing the host experiences a surge in traffic.
• Choose a nearer hosting. When information is coming from a location near your user, it does not need to travel farther to load.
• Compress images on your site. There are tools and plugins that can do this automatically for you if you are using WordPress. Online tools are also available for individual compressing.
• Minify the code of your web pages. Remove unnecessary notes and comments.
• Test the loading time on different devices. You’ll want to see how your page responds when you’re using a high-end desktop versus a lower-end gadget. Test on mobile devices as well.
• Utilize AMP. Accelerated mobile pages are stripped of unnecessary formatting so that they can load in mobile devices faster.

Improving the speed of your page will benefit you in many ways. Work on this today and get those conversions going.