If you’ve been following this fast track SEO course you should feel pretty good: you are almost up to speed.
- You’ve researched your content and keywords.
- You’re using schema markup.
- You’ve made sure your social shares will be optimised.
- And you’ve optimised your site structure to the hilt.
Nothing can stop your bid for serach engine domination.
Except for that awful wait for your page to load.
Let’s go back to basics and sort out your page speed issues shall we?
All the previous posts in this series can be found here.
For the complete version of this Fast track SEO course head over to Amazon.
It’s yours for less than a fiver!
On-page SEO: Is your page speed slowing your site down?
60% of the SEO experts Moz polled in its state of SEO survey thought that page speed is going to become more important as a ranking factor in the coming years.
And as for the rest?
They thought it would remain as important as it already is. And that’s pretty darned important.
In terms of page-level features that are not related to keywords, it’s right up there at number four in terms of its perceived influence on your site’s final rankings.
Only clickthrough rate from the SERPs, mobile-friendly design (for mobile rankings) and unique content pip it to the top.
Having a slow site puts you on the fast train to search oblivion.
It’s obvious really. Little can annoy users more than waiting for a webpage.
And if you focus on the user all else follows (yes, that old chestnut again).
How fast is fast?
There was a time when six seconds was regularly wheeled out as the average time a user may expect a page to load. And it wasn’t that long ago.
Today anything less than 3 seconds is akin to commercial suicide – and the smart money won’t allow a load time of more than 2 seconds.
(Don’t just take our word for it – check out the studies in ‘Find out more’ below.)
Speed matters because visitors are less likely to return to a website if it is slow. Fact.
And studies have found that just a quarter of a second can make a big difference in return rates compared to those enjoyed by a slightly faster competitor.
Speed also matters because Google weighs speed increasingly heavily in its ranking decisions.
And don’t forget that a slow site will also affect:
- Your bounce rates.
- Visitors’ dwell times.
- The number of pages visited.
- And your return visits.
Of course, each of these is a ranking factor in its own right. So, it really is time you got up to speed about speed!
How to improve your site’s speed
Firstly, you’ll need to know what your site’s speed is.
Google analytics can tell you this – check out the ‘Find out more’ below.
But, another Google tool is very useful as well. Page Speed Insights (here) scans your page to make suggestions for exactly what you could and should improve.
And of all the things you can do to speed up your geriatric site here are the big three.
1. Change where your site is hosted. Go with a hosting company that guarantees fast speeds.
2. Minimise the size of your web pages, images and other files used on your site.
3. Use caching wherever possible.
Let’s have a look at each of these.
Hosting
Compared to retail premises web hosting is amazingly cheap: for as little as a few pounds or dollars a month you can access super-fast hosting. And for a fair few dollars more you could be hosted on your own fully maintained server.
If your speed issue is with your hosting – and your website is monetised in some way – then it is highly likely to be a false economy not to upgrade, change or set up on your own.
We apologise for interrupting this ‘Speed’ unit, but another factor comes into play in relation to hosting.
Let’s take a look at the importance of a unique IP address before we resume normal service.
Your IP address is the string of numbers separated by dots that identify your computer on a network.
If you have a shared hosting account you are likely to also share an IP address. This means your ranking could be being tarnished by others not as squeaky clean as you.
Go on, treat yourself to your own IP address!
Minimising
Don’t be fooled: simply resizing images to a smaller size will do diddlysquat to your speed issues.
If you are using high resolution images get a graphic designer to run them through Photoshop and create web-friendly versions of them.
Caching
If you love WordPress, as so many do, we suggest you have an affair with caching.
This is the thing about any database-driven CMS like WordPress.
Every single time a visitor requests a certain page the CMS has to run all the procedures needed to create that page. From scratch.
Here’s what happens:
A request for a page arrives.
It connects with the database, which searches for the content required, pulls it kicking and screaming down the data corridors until it arrives at the page template. And then it has to assemble it all, dust it down so it’s presentable, until….
Ta-dah: the page is displayed.
Hang on: the visitor seems to have left!
Let’s sort this out!
Page caching sets up a static version of your page so that all this behind-the-scenes activity is no longer needed. Cached pages are served up as static HTML versions to avoid all those time-consuming queries to your database. A search engine stores a ‘back-up’ version of your page, which can be served up to a user in place of the version that is created ‘on the fly’.
There are many ways to do this – none of them complicated or onerous. For instance, WordPress users can try a free plug-in called W3 Total Cache (here).
Find out more about page speed
- Take a quick peek at just one of the consumer expectation reports concerning site speed here.
- Find more ways to address your site speed here.
- Learn what Google Analytics can tell you about your own site’s speed here.
- Let Google tell you where you can get things running quicker here.
All the posts in this series can be found here.
For the complete version of this Fast track SEO course head over to Amazon.
It’s yours for less than a fiver!