Website Speed is Major ranking Factor

 

     The latest update by Google in July clearly stated that “page speed” is a major landing page factor in order to rank your page on top. Yes! You read that right. Page speed will now play a major role in deciding the ranking factor of your site. The time has come for you to improve your page speed and make them accessible for Google and visitors. Work on your mobile SEO now to make your site visible on the top order of search results. 

What is Page Speed?

     Page speed is a crucial factor when it comes to Google ranking factors. Most experts agree with the fact that customers visit the page which has a fast loading speed. In Fact, the main goal of any website is to give your customers a hassle free browsing experience. If your page takes too long to load its content, then your page gets bounced back to the low of the search results.  

     Google likes to rank the websites which offer visitors a positive browsing experience. So keep this in mind while optimizing your website next time. But how to increase the page speed? By creating a responsive design, well-organized content, and with no intrusive ads you can boost your page speed.  

  There are a lot of tools to check your website speed. The most commonly used tools I recommend you to use are 

1. Google PageSpeed Insights 
2. GTmetrix  

Page speed- A major ranking factor:

     Page speed works more like an indicator of the site’s success which eventually decides the ranking factor of the site. Only the pages with extremely slow speed need to worry about the ranking. If your page has an average speed of 70 or above then you can still get some decent ranking. A good page speed boosts your site’s ranking tremendously. 

     Google’s most recent examination shows that the possibility of bounce increments 32% when the page load time goes from 1s to 3s. 1s to 5s expands the opportunity to 90% and if your site takes up to 10s to stack, the possibility of rank increases to 123%. That is mind-blowing. For web crawlers, better outcomes and execution are an indication of a sound website that satisfies clients and in this way should be remunerated with a higher positioning.

     According to the recent Google updates, they have said that page speed is important and has a top priority in the mobile-first index. The protocols are yet to be disclosed by Google themselves, but it’s clear to us now that mobile page speed plays a vital role now. Since the smartphone industry has gained tremendous growth in the last decade, the SEO ranking protocols have also changed benefiting the customers. 

Things you can do that boost up your page speed:

Activating AMP:

     Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) has a main target to increase the speed of mobile sites. This AMP HTML strips down the factors that affect the website’s speed like Javascript and other third parties. Statistics also reveal that pages that are created with AMP HTML have a 15-80% increase in their website speed than non-AMP websites. Pages that have done AMP HTML are highlighted with AMP tags and rank higher in the search results and gives a lightning speed fast browsing experience for the users. 

Compress your site files:

     By using Gzip, you can compress the size of your CSS and JavaScript files which are larger than 150 bytes. But you are not advised to use Gzip for images as there will be a loss of quality. In the case of image compression, you need to use photoshop where you can reduce the size of the image and retain the picture clarity. Use PNG format for graphic format and JPEG format for photographs. 

Use PHP7:

     If you are a WordPress developer you would have come across PHP7. But WordPress developers have their comfort zone with PHP5.2 and PHP5.3 that they never want to get out of. But the market has changed and improvisation is the only key to sustainability. WordPress developers should move to PHP7 to increase their site’s speed and future-proofing. 

Minimize redirects and remove render-blocking JavaScript:

     A site with many redirects may annoy the visitors. A redirected page takes additional loading time for HTTPS response time to complete thus making a longer waiting time for visitors. So make fewer redirect pages to your site to increase the page speed. Programs need to fabricate a DOM tree by parsing HTML before they can deliver a page. In the event that your program experiences content during this cycle, it needs to stop and execute it before it can proceed.