Get Your Site Up to Speed – Literally – With Google PageSpeed

The success of any website is directly related to how fast it loads. Websites with excellent content and the most spectacular graphics on the web will lose potential customers if the pagespeed loading time is lagging. Most people will wait no more than five seconds for a landing webpage to load before moving on.

It is imperative to have a high Google PageSpeed for a business to do well.

What Is Google PageSpeed?

Google PageSpeed is a set of free tools that can assess the performance, accessibility, and usability of a website. It can measure mobile and desktop platforms.

Why Does PageSpeed Matter?

The speed at which a page loads impacts far more than user experience and revenue generation. It also impacts search engine rankings. This is nothing new for SEOs, but it took on a new importance when Google decided to alter its ranking algorithm to incorporate site speed.

In short, Google assigns a ranking score bonus to pages that load faster, moving that website’s listing up in their search results. They are using Chrome to track page speed, and they send information about device and page speed to Google each time a Chrome browser visits a page.

When initiating a search, Google considers the speed of the webpages that match the search parameters and assigns a ranking bonus to those that load the quickest. This moves a page’s ranking up or down in the search results page based, in part, on a comparison of the webpage’s loading time to the speed of competitors’ landing pages.

Boost PageSpeed with These SEO Tips

Speed is the name of the game, and that includes loading times for landing webpages. Improved loading times mean improved customer interaction, which leads to improved conversion rates. There are steps that a business can take to speed up a page’s loading time.

• Keep it simple. To analyze the behavior of a user visiting a website, tracking codes are needed. A webpage slows down with each tracking code added to it. A business doesn’t need numerous different analytics programs, however. Have marketers review each analytics program to determine which is necessary. Remove the ones that aren’t.
• Limit video embeds. Most video embeds use iFrames (including YouTube). Displaying a video can encourage customer engagement and improve user experience, but it also places a drag on page load times. Embedding a video basically, causes a webpage to load another separate page within the landing page. This slows down the whole process.
• Go easy on the share buttons. Website builders include share buttons to improve referral traffic, thus reaching new customers. Share buttons are generally javascript-based, which generates an iFrame on the page. Everything slows down.
• Optimize the site’s database. The job of a database is to store information. Any site that includes an e-commerce store, news site, blog or dynamic functionality like an internal search is using a database. This impacts page loading times. Steps to optimize the database, such as adding an index, can improve page speed times.
• Investigate a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN stores a copy of a website on servers within its network, all over the world. This gives customers across the globe access to content that is resident on a nearby server. Most CDNs require payment for services.

Check It Out

Google is paying a great deal of attention to speed, and so are consumers. Any business can check the speed of a landing page by using Google’s free tools, including PageSpeed Insights. Input the webpage URL and click “analyze.” A PageSpeed rating will display, along with suggestions on how to improve the numbers.

It only takes a few seconds – the same amount of time a potential customer will wait for a page to load.