Page speed is important for SEO and especially for the people who want to use your site. A big contributor to performance problems is images. When you optimize images, you may see substantial improvements in page performance. Optimizing images means using modern formats like WebP or selecting the right settings for JPEG encoding. You’ve probably heard that page speed is an important Google ranking factor. There are a million blog posts out there that tell you how important page speed is for SEO. Plus, a few years ago, Google rolled out a page speed update that specifically downranked sites that loaded slowly on mobile devices. Even a large-scale analysis of one million Google search results found a correlation between loading speed and first-page rankings in Google.
How do we understand and use page speed insights to optimize our websites?
Here are some of the key aspects of this page experience: update loading time and How fast your website loads. How fast does that main content get into their view activity? How long does it take for a user to actually engage with your page and then visual stability? Is the page stable, or do things move around as it’s loading and create this kind of weird experience? Those three things Google is looking at very closely, and they play a big role when it comes to search algorithms, ranking your site, and making sure that you meet the expectations of your end user.
How do we check our page speed?
You can do this in a few ways; the first way is to go into the search console, and eventually, through a number of clicks, you will get over to page speed insights. These tools have been grafted or integrated.
This is the page experience-like box within the Google search console. we’ll take a look at that in just a minute and it breaks it down like how your page is performing as well as shows you what are called core web vitals. Google has given us some tools that allow us to see how our pages are performing when it comes to speed and engagement interactivity, and they’re even giving us some tips on how we can improve those pages.
Page speed insight is really the tool that does this for us. They perform both on mobile as well as desktop, and they give us suggestions on how these pages could be improved. You just pretty much type in a URL and hit go. You can either go directly to the page speed insights tool and just type that URL in and hit analyze, or you can look at core web vitals inside of the Google search console.
One thing to keep in mind: site speed is not a substitution for all the other factors that go into where a particular site or a particular web page is going to rank. It’s one factor out of many. Is it important? Yes, and you should optimize for as many factors as you can, optimize for every single thing that you can, and make an improvement. Especially if you’re a smaller business and not an enterprise or a Fortune 500 brand that has a lot of other factors working in your favor. If you’re a small brand or if you have a lot of competition, then you should optimize for speed. but don’t forget to optimize your content for each particular keyword.
You probably have a particular page that the keyword is ranking for, or you’re trying to make it rank better for that, and if not, you should create that content. And not to downplay the importance of links because that is a big factor too.
Myth about Page speed
A common misconception among SEO consultants and a lot of people who actually work in the web industry, people who build websites for a living, is that if you get a perfect score or a near-perfect score in Page Speed Insights, then you should rank higher.
SEO is very complicated, and two sites can have very similar factors and they can get very different results. Sometimes, it’s about having the right combinations of things. But if you have the right type of content and have a ton of links coming from industry sites, then site speed is only going to help you improve. if you’re a smaller business You will want to improve that. It can make some improvements. if your site speed is really bad. So, for example, if it takes 10 seconds or 13 seconds to load your page, and then your competitors might take two to four seconds to load a particular page, then you are probably losing users People who are searching for your business on Google and they click it, and then it takes a long time to load; those people are probably leaving or they’re not finding what they’re looking for, and they’re getting impatient. The thing about the internet, having broadband, having everybody have a mobile device, and having so much information at our fingertips is people are really impatient.
Attention spans are a lot shorter than maybe they were 20 or 30 years ago, so having a site that loads fast and loads quickly is an important thing.
2 reasons Google Prioritize Page Speed
There’s an obvious reason; of course, it’s good for the users. Google wants to retain market share, and if they push sites that are fast loading, their fast sites to the top, as long as they meet all the other qualifications of getting people to their goal, then that’s good for Google because that means people keep using Google, and then people who are frustrated with not being able to rank organically can sell them AdWords, and then they can make money, and everybody’s happy.
The other reason is it does cost Google a lot of money and resources to have Googlebot, go and crawl from different locations and gather up all these websites and gather up all these web pages.
Getting 100 in page speed
If you get a hundred in Page Speed Insights and it loads super-fast, almost instantaneously, you can arrange different things and do different things with web development to make an average page load in less than three seconds. Sometimes, maybe two and a half seconds or even two seconds or less than that, depending on how many resources you’re loading on the page And if you’re deferring images, lazy loading images, using next-gen images like WebP instead of JPEGs or PNGs, which tend to be heavier, and deferring loading asynchronously, all the other components like JavaScript and things like that, then a page can load really fast.
Can you improve SEO by only focusing on page speed?
if you focus only on improving your page speed. Let’s say that you don’t do any work on the content or links or the web design of the site; that’s an SEO factor too. But if you only work on the page speed, how much can you stand to improve your SEO? It depends on the competition. It depends on what your competitors have on their pages. If everybody’s site is not that great and the content isn’t that great, it can make a difference. But if everybody has the right type of content for that particular search on their page already, or your competition has a really strong brand where they have a lot of links from other industry websites or other authoritative websites, then you will need to do more than simply improve the page speed.
But you should do it anyway; it’s the right thing to do for your customers, for users, and for a search engine. Anything that you can do to improve is good. Let’s say that you are in fierce competition, and you’ve dialed in all the things like content, links, and design, and you’re working on the page speed; it can make an improvement. Do keep your expectations within a reasonable range of what’s going to happen. The most important thing that you must keep in mind with managing expectations is that Google wants to see that your site is faster than your competitors.
It doesn’t need to be “one hundred” across the board in Page Speed Insights; it doesn’t need to load in like.1 second, but it does need to be faster than your competition. So if your competitors are slower loading, that can be an advantage for you, and Google will test with user data, because it does out quite often, sites that have comparable content and links, will push different ones to get some user data on all of those pages and see what the users, how they respond to different pages, and use that data to make a determination on what sites should stay at the top and which should be shuffled down the ranks.