We’ve all been frustrated at some point or another with a web page that takes too long to load. Site speed might be an essential part of the online user experience, but it also plays an important role in your SEO and page rankings. Three seconds of loading time might not seem like much, but it’s enough to drive up your bounce rate and send the vast majority of visitors fleeing to another website.
 
Learn more about how your web design and page speed can influence your rankings and what you can do to make sure that you stay on top.
 
What is site speed? How is it different from page speed?
Webpage speed is the length of time it takes for individual web pages on your site to load, like your homepage or services page. Page speed can be measured two ways: how long it takes all content to fully display on a page, or the “time to first byte,” which is how long it takes for a browser to receive the first byte of information from the server. Most experts agree that Google measures the time to first byte, but only as a way to determine overall site speed.
 
Your site speed is then determined by an average sampling of individual page views on your site. You can think of site speed as the average time it takes for a page to load on your website.
 
Why do search engines care about site speed?
In short, Google cares about what its users care about. Google has said outright since 2010 that site speed is part of their page ranking algorithm. As WiFi and broadband internet gets faster and faster, users have far less patience for a slow-loading website. Additionally, it simply takes longer for Google’s crawlers to scan a slow-load page, which interrupts their entire process.
 
If your site is loading slowly, your rankings will drop.
 
What about mobile?
There’s no question that a mobile friendly website design will earn you big points with Google’s ranking algorithm, but on the whole, site speed is determined by web browsers, not mobile browsers. However, that could be changing any day now.
 
How do I improve my site speed?
Let’s start with the factors that might be slowing your site down: Too many advertisements or plug-ins, poor web hosting, heavy images, and dense code, among other things. The best way to improve site speed is to play around with some of these features and test them out in real time — yet only 55% of companies currently conduct any Internet user experience tests.
 
If you don’t have the technical know-how to improve your website, your user experience, and your page rankings all at once, you may need a full-service digital marketing company. Hire a professional team to analyze and revamp your website so that you’ll be cruising in the fast lane.
 
Looking for a digital marketing company to revamp your web design and SEO services? Contact MRN Web Designs and let us know how we can start helping you.