Why Site Speed Is Important for Rankings

It’s an unfortunate but necessary fact of life that pretty much all website owners, whoever they may be and whatever their websites may be for, are beholden to search engine algorithms.

Where you rank on a search engine’s results page will dictate whether users can find you easily; if you’re not ranking high enough, then you could potentially be losing a lot of business.

One of the most important elements of your site when it comes to rankings is speed. To put it simply, how fast your site loads is critical, although you may not immediately realise why.

If your site is slow, don’t worry; there are tons of measures you can take. From looking into a custom WordPress development service to implementing lots of small measures across all of your pages, you’re never without options.

Here’s our guide to why site speed is important for rankings, and what you can do to improve your site’s speed!

What do we mean when we say “site speed”?

First, let’s define exactly what we mean when we refer to “site speed”.

In simple terms, site speed refers to how long each of your site’s pages takes to load in full, as well as how long the pages take to load certain pieces of content.

There are a number of different metrics used by analytics services to determine what your site’s speed looks like.

These include the “first contentful paint” (FCP) metric, which measures how long it takes for your site to display the first piece of content on a page, as well as “first meaningful paint” (FMP), which is generally considered to be the point at which users would deem a site “loaded”.

Lots of other metrics exist as well, but just be aware that your site speed essentially refers to how long a site takes to load, whether that be full pages or individual pieces of content like text and images.

Why is site speed important?

If you’re following along, you’ve probably already realised why site speed is important for your site, but we’ll run through it anyway just in case.

When a user visits your site, they’ve probably landed there by searching for the kind of information or services that you provide.

As such, they’re probably going to want access to that information or those services as quickly as possible, and the longer it takes them to get there, the more frustrated they will become.

If your site takes a long time to load, then users may become bored or annoyed with waiting and may click elsewhere. They may also think that your site isn’t working or is down.

Naturally, these are not things you want prospective customers to think, and so it’s important to present them with a fully-loaded and fully-rendered webpage as quickly as possible.

In fact, one study conducted by mobile company Ericsson measured emotional responses to page load times on smartphones and found that the stress of waiting for pages to load “is equivalent to the anxiety of taking a math test or watching a horror movie alone”.

What is considered a good page load time?

Generally speaking, many services and experts consider around 2 seconds or less to be a good page load time.

This means that your page, including everything that’s necessary for a user to get the optimum experience out of what they’re seeing, should load in less than 2 seconds.

Ideally, we want to get that number as low as possible, so anywhere from one second to 1.5 seconds is absolutely ideal.

There may be individual elements on your page that don’t load quite that quickly, but as long as the main body of your site, including fonts, images, and everything else that creates a holistic experience for viewers, loads in that time, then you’re doing well.

What can you do to improve page load time?

If your site is taking longer than 2 seconds to load, you may be despairing right now. What could you possibly do to improve your page load speed?

Well, don’t fret; as we said at the outset of this article, there are things you can do to make your pages load faster. Here are some of our tips and tricks to get those pages loading with lightning speed!

• Focus on your images. Many slow pages have the issue of unoptimised images, which means they’re bulky and uncompressed. Find the right balance between dimensions and file size for an image, and make sure that you’ve compressed it using a free compression service like TinyJPG or Compress JPEG before uploading it to your site.
• Try not to use too many redirects. We know that sometimes, redirects are necessary; if a page dies, for instance, you may want to redirect users elsewhere when they find it. However, minimising redirects is a good way to increase page speed, because redirects add just a few extra moments to a page’s load speed, and those moments might end up being crucial for retaining users.
• Choose your host carefully. The best website hosts will proudly display their server’s quicker response times when you sign up, so choose the host that has the lowest speeds you can find within your price range. If a host doesn’t display their server response times or doesn’t even mention this element of site hosting on their website, then that’s a sign you should look elsewhere.
• Test your site regularly. You might think that your page load speeds are fine and you don’t need to test regularly, but this would be a mistake. Making sure that you’re consistently testing your site to see whether page load speeds have decreased is critical for keeping on top of things.
• Sign up with a custom development service. Some of the best custom development services out there can help you to create a high-performance site that doesn’t sacrifice quality, so if you don’t think you’re a site design wizard, don’t be afraid to look for help!

Conclusion

As we hope you can see from this article, page load speeds are an extremely important part of website ownership.

If your site is loading slower, then you could lose clicks and conversions, and that’s lethal, so make sure that you’re on top of your page load speeds!