What is Page Speed and What Role Does it Play in SEO?
Page speed is a ranking factor that was first introduced in 2018 as part of the ‘Speed Update’. Previously, Google only looked at desktop searches, but they’re now looking at performance across all devices, including mobile. This means that if you want to rank well in Google, it’s important to make sure that your site loads quickly.
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What is Page Speed and what role does it play in SEO?
As you might imagine, there are a lot of factors that go into a website’s page speed. Having the right tools and knowledge is essential to understanding the impact that this metric can have on your website.
Core Web Vitals states that Page Speed is one of the most important ranking factors and it’s a must-have. This is because it improves user experience, increases conversion rates, and demonstrates that you are taking your website seriously.
Increasing your page speed also helps with SEO by bringing in more traffic and getting you to the top of search engine results pages. It’s no secret that Google wants to serve up accurate and functioning websites in their results, which is why it has made this a very important ranking factor.
A slow-loading page is a huge turnoff to users and can result in them leaving your site before it has even loaded. A study from Google shows that over half of mobile users will leave your site if it takes longer than three seconds to load.
How fast a website can load depends on a variety of things, like its code, images, scripts and other files. Using the best possible image file size for your content can have a big impact on your page’s loading time, as can deferring the loading of render-blocking elements in theme files and optimizing your images.
Reducing the number of heavy images you use on your site can greatly help to increase your page’s speed. This is because images that are larger than they need to be, and that aren’t optimized, are typically very large and take up a lot of space on your server.
Another issue that can contribute to a slow-loading page is the number of heavy scripts you use on your site. This includes JavaScript, which is often used for complex animations and transitions on modern websites. These files can be especially slow to load, which can significantly reduce your page’s speed.
You can test your site’s speed with a tool such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This tool gives you a score for your desktop and mobile versions of the site and can be very helpful in helping you identify areas for improvement.
Your score is based on a combination of your site’s overall speed and the page’s speed at each individual page. This makes it easier to see where the issues lie and how much of an impact they have.
The main reason why it is important to get your page speed up as soon as possible is that it can have a huge impact on how much your SEO is going to improve. Having the right tools, such as PageSpeed Insights, can help you determine where to focus your efforts in order to improve your score and bring in more visitors.