The most important and frequently asked question in 2020 is what is the current relationship of search engine optimization SEO with website page speed as a search engine ranking factor. Site speed is a concern for millions of website owners and SEO professionals in the digital era of technology; with Google’s latest page speed updates, more people want to know what the actionable tools to improve the webpage speed are. Many also want to know which ranking factors are the most important in the eyes of Google Search. This is a million-dollar question that we are going to answer and explore today for boozing your website traffic and improve SEO outcomes in 2020.

Drawbacks of a Slow Website: A Problem

If you have a website that is beautiful but not faster, then it is unlikely to get you the results you aim for in your SEO. And when it comes to building a conversion rate or improving your traffic, an SEO optimized website is a critical factor to help people achieve better results.

If you have a slow eCommerce site or even a blog, then you have a serious problem. People will not remain on those pages because they will bounce faster than ever before. Speeding up your website is the only option for SEO professionals in 2020 to get better results. However, it is not always an easy task to speed up your website. This can involve many problems such as bad code on the website or a bad design. And you also need to fix and diagnose these issues big time before they drive traffic away to competitor’s website.

According to Neil Patel, Google will ditch your website if you do not fix the page speed issues. Running your website through Google web page insights can help you find the score of your website. If the score is below 80%, the website can be moderately slow and can run slower. Google gives you a preferential treatment to websites that load quickly in a faster way. The faster your website loads, the lower the bounce rate. If your website is fast, you have a better chance of ranking on Google.

Despite using many tools for website speed correction, these tools do not give you the best instructions to score higher on Google. So, you should care about the page speed before the issues get out of hand.

Caring about your Page Speed is Vital for SEO

 When it comes to ranking your website higher on Google, ranking your website higher on Google SEPRs is difficult, but yet achievable. If the top ten searches are not listing your website, then it won’t appear on the first page. A vast majority of search engine users simply won’t click the first page. There is no doubt that the websites listed on the first page of Google can provide so many good results. Therefore, staying focus on SEO is not the only answer to solving your problem, focusing more on the page speed can help you to get more benefit out of your SEO efforts.

Neil Patel also states that there is a huge relationship between the bounce rate on your website and page speed. That correlation is also confirmed by Google’s latest page speed updates and industry benchmarks. The latest updates by Google state that as the page speed goes up, the load time goes up, and the users are more likely to bounce from your website. Therefore, this shows that the bounce rate of users dramatically increases when the page speed goes down.

According to some statistics on Neil Patel’s blog, when the website load time increases by 3 seconds, the bounce rate of users increases by 32%. When the site load time increases by 5 seconds, then the bounce rate of users become 90%. Even worse, as the page load speed increases by 10 seconds, the bounce rate becomes 106%. This means that more than 100% visitors will drive away from your site as the page speed increases by 10 seconds.  This can go on and you can lose all the visitors on your website as the page speed goes down.

Another report by Google shows that many industries have websites that load incredibly slowly. These industries include automotive industry, fiancé, media, entertainment, and technology industry. Almost all of these industries in America are missing the mark of achieving a great website speed. Therefore, if you want to have a shot at ranking on the first page of Google, your site needs to load in under three seconds. So regarding your own specific niche and industry, what is driving your website speed to become slower?

According to Search Engine Journal, the most common cause of a slow page loading is an inclusion of bulky images in addition to bad coding that ruins the website design and its capability to load quicker. If you look at any entertainment site in this digital era of technology, then these websites are full of heavy images that take too much time to load. Most of those websites do not realize the importance of optimizing those images; you can save pages that are taking significant space on the web server.

The data of Google Benchmark shows that that the best practice for page size or weight is fewer than 500KB. This implies if your page size is more than 500KB, then you are risking a slow website many users will ignore.

So, the important question here is what can you do to increase the page speed of your website when you have identified the problem? Let us get deeper into these techniques.

1: Don’t Save Money on Web Hosting

People are trying to save money on all sorts of web hosting these days. This also includes making the unwise decisions and save money on vital SEO / SMM tools such as SEMRush, Moa, and Google Analytics. The terrible thing is that many website owners try to save money on web hosting and decide t host their websites on servers that cram many web pages to fit on one server. This can make your website look like a clown; this is similar to fit 20 people in one tiny car and hope that they will move comfortably.

One thing cheap hosting gives you is the availability of your website on the Internet; however, even if your visitors find your website on Google, it will load so slowly that the users will get frosted in a flash and you will lose significant buyers for your eCommerce site. Because every user wants to get on a website and see the related information quickly, there is no way anyone will stick around your website that loads slow as a tortoise.

According to Search Engine Journal, people can stay on your website for as long as they can get any value from it and as quickly as possible. This may include people to buy a product or meet a specific objective. But here is a problem for you; if you let the website speed go even a few seconds down, then the users will hate that experience and leave the website without converting. This shows that as much as you love your kids, you should love your website and care about its speed and design before it converts potential buyers into frosted users leaving for this reason.

2: Enable Compression on your Site

Compression is a great way to reduce the size of files and images in the modern times. Compression technique has been incorporated in many operating systems including Microsoft Windows that allows you to compress your files and entire drives for better performance and speed. This same principle of compression applies on the website speed if you use the modern technology and use GZIP compression that can reduce the time your website takes to load HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Compressed images can get to your browser more easily and quickly. Do not worry about this feature because allowing compression won’t leave your users to do anything extra. The good news is that all latest browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Edge support GZIP compression. The process of HTTP requests won’t be disturbed with compression.

3: Enable Browser Cache

Caching is an old concept and technology that has been used by Microsoft Internet Explorer for more than 20 years. Caching is a handy technique that allows elements of a web page to store on you’re the browser so that the next time people visit your website. This means whenever people come back to your website or open a specific service page, browser cache enabled will allow people to load the web page more quickly. The reason for loading page quickly is that browser cache sends another HTTP request to the server of any cached elements. This makes the page-opening experience more smooth and cheerful for the users.

4: Use Minimum Code

Smart website developers know how they can use code efficiently that improves the overall design and quality of their website. Every website is like a child to a professional developer. However, if you are a website developer, you need to take care that you use minimum CSS and JavaScript code while building your website. Moreover, you also need to take care that removing white spaces and comments in code can significantly help to improve the efficiency of code and website speed. Because a messy and bulky coded website can take lot longer to load, it is your responsibility as a designer to use code efficiently.

The good news for website designers is that in this era of CMS and so many robust plugins, you can use WordPress plugin that can replace the links on your website head for your regular CSS and JavaScript files. Some of the best-known WordPress plugin you can use include:

• W3 Total Cache
• WP Super Cache
• WP Rocket

It will take some time and effort to adjust things in the beginning; you can test your website thoroughly for code and plugin to enhance the page speed.

5: Minify HTML coding

If you HTML coding is taking too much space and causing your website to run slow, then this could be another big factor in getting a good ranking on Google and drive more traffic. The process of magnification is described by Neil Patel as reducing the unnecessary and duplicate data from your website. This may also include the HTML code that is used unnecessarily and makes the problems for your browser to interpret HTML.

This process forces you to fix code, formatting, and fixing the useless code. You can make the HTML code shorter wherever possible for your website to run faster. Again, many thanks to beautiful plugin available for WordPress; you don’t need to be a code fixer or a programmer to do that. This plugin HTML Minify can be downloaded from the site in a second and once it is installed on your website, it makes the further steps simpler for you to maximize page speed. For example, you can use the plugin to minify your script that can win you great speed of page.

6: Optimize your Media on the Website

In addition to taking care of image compression and plugin, another factor that plays a role in improving website speed is optimizing media files. Since mobile devices with cameras are most popular devices people use these days to watch websites and videos. Content management systems such as WordPress make it easy to upload images; many people simply shoot a photo and upload the photo on the website without knowing the importance of optimizing media file.

Media file optimization is a huge necessity these days. This tactic has a huge potential to help you improve the speed of your website. And this technique is also not difficult for people to incorporate to their strategy. Some investment of time and energy in media optimization can tremendously benefit you to improve the speed of your website.

There are many elements and things you can optimize on your website. These include:

• Optimizing Images

Optimizing images on your website is the most important thing and a necessity these days. You must opt for using the best image formats such as JPEG or JPG. GIF and PNJ are also considered as the best image formats on the website. Make sure that you are not putting too large or too small websites on your website. If the images are over-sized, there is no use of it on the website. It will lonelily contribute to slowing the website down further. For example, a 1600-pixel wide range image can slow down your website a lot compared to a 600-pixel image.

Moreover, regarding image optimization, compressing the image files that you upload on your website is also important for improving the page speed. There is myriad software these days such as Adobe Photoshop that offers great image compression capability for designers. There is also some plugin for WordPress such as WWW Image Optimizer and Tiny JPG. Use these tools and compress the images automatically before posting to your web page.

• Video Optimization

Choosing an ideal format for your videos is just as important as choosing a format for images. For example, the most common and popular video format is MP4 format that helps to provide a smallest size of a video as compared to other video formats. Moreover, keep in mind the screen size of your visitors; eliminate the audio track if the video is running in the background.

In addition, do not forget to compress the video files before fitting them on your website at the top of the page. You can use Adobe Premiere for that purpose and reducing the video length is also important. Consider uploading videos to You Tube or Video can help to increase the load time of website. Do not store videos locally on the web server.

But this is not all! You should also do some more important things as we are guiding you to use advanced techniques to increase your page speed.

• Enable your browser to select the images based on the screen size of your visitors.
• Images that are incorporated into CSS which mostly include background images based on the screen size. Serve CSS images using media queries.

Conclusion

Website development is a tough task that requires making efforts for weeks and months. Designers strive hard to make every document, image, icon, and sidebar perfect. However, they often ignore the Google’s guidelines to create a website that loads faster that impacts the page speed significantly that adversely affects your SEO. Optimizing your website and code is simple with the above techniques. You can make a great impression on users if website loads quicker than your competitors. Simply use the techniques described above and we guarantee that your site speed will improve in a number of days.

It is vital to get your on-page SEO Optimization from a reputed service provider. www.seo.com.pk offers high-quality digital marketing service for all business websites. We make your business site and page load quickly and perfectly set all its parameters for quick SEO rankings.