Site speed relates to how quickly your page loads, improving user experience, conversion rate and rankings.
It’s one of the most important things to optimise on your website, yet it’s much more complicated than a single metric.
What is site speed?
Site speed refers to the performance of an overall website, while page speed refers to a single page. But there’s more than one way to measure a good site speed. It’s not just about page load time but more about how quickly a page can offer a good user experience, as users tend not to wait for the page to properly load before exploring.
Between the two options, which would you prefer?
Option 1
A page that quickly displays content at the top of the screen but takes longer for you to view images and click buttons.
Option 2
A page that loads more slowly, but you can interact with elements such as buttons and view images.
Users who have to wait to be able to interact with a page may feel more frustrated and more likely to click off, as it feels that the page is taking longer to load.
How important is site speed for SEO?
If users get frustrated with long page loads, Google can track their behaviour through bounces back to the search results or short visits to your site. A quicker page load time means a better user experience, leading to higher conversion and lower bounce rates. With a faster overall site speed, Google will see your page as a good search result and could even give you a boost in the rankings because of it.
Google has been measuring the speed of websites and using it as a ranking factor since 2010, and in 2018, the Google ‘Speed Update’ made page speed a ranking factor for mobile searches. The 2021 update showed that page speed and user experience were linked, and core web vitals state that speed is an essential ranking factor.
Creating quality content remains the most important way to rank, as Google will serve it to users even with a slower page experience. But good content combined with a fast page load will see you succeed.
How to measure site speed
Core web vitals give you an insight into your page speed by looking at loading time, interactivity and visual stability with various tools available to monitor these factors. Google has set the standard for these into three categories; good, needs improvement and poor.
Page load time
How long does the most important content take to appear?
Interactivity
How quickly does the page allow for user interaction?
Visual stability
Do items move around the page while loading?
What affects your page speed?
Many factors can affect your page and site speed, including:
Website themes
Large files
Badly written code
Images and videos
Redirects
Too many plugins
Our technical SEO experts can audit your website to find ways of improving your site speed for a better user experience.
To find out more about Visualsoft's SEO services, fill in the form and a member of the team will be in touch.
