The importance of PageSpeed

One morning in the summer of last year, Jesus Mendes, SEO director of mail online, the world's most visited online newspaper, woke up in shock. A major Google update had resulted in him losing half his traffic overnight. The impact on his site was so dramatic and disconcerting that Jesus was forced to post on the Google search bar to ask the SEO community for help.

Answer No. 1 to your question pointed to the answer to the problem: Page speed.

So, if the biggest online newspaper can lose half its traffic overnight due to slow loading times, also known as Page Speed, what chance does your site have of attracting visitors if you've never thought about Page Speed?

This article will show you why it's more important to do it the right way, as well as showing you some important resources for improving your page speed and SEO rankings. First, let's see why Pagespeed is so important not only at the moment of create your website, but whenever necessary. 

Page speed and sales

Pagespeed plays an important role in sales. In the early days of dial-up, users were patient enough to wait a long time just for an image to load, whereas today 53% of mobile site visitors go elsewhere if a site takes more than three seconds to load.

Nowadays, customers simply aren't willing to wait and have plenty of other places to go to get what they want. Slow page speed is bad for everyone. Even big brands find it hard to keep customers on their sites if they have slow page speeds.

Digital marketing guru Neil Patel illustrated the vital importance of PageSpeed by referring to the study Amazon conducted, which found that every extra second a site takes to load costs the company 1% of its revenue.

Especially if your site is for E-Commerce: the user needs to be able to quickly view your site and everything they want to buy with just a few clicks. Even Amazon rarely has video on its homepage and they have dedicated teams working on their site 24 hours a day.

The importance of page speed for Google rankings

Page speed is also a ranking factor. This means that it helps web pages appear in a higher position in Google's search results, which means more visitors to a site. Users like to browse pages that load quickly and stay on them longer, which improves bounce rates.

Fast-loading sites with low bounce rates are the ones that rank highest. Google's search engine has long been number one, which is why what they expect often becomes the standard.

We all know that most people click on the first ten results. Improving the speed of your site also improves other ranking factors. Beyond a certain point, the slower your site's page speed, the less chance it has of reaching the top rankings or even being ranked at all.

A multi-channel approach for Pagespeed. 

In recent years, Google has become much stricter with its technical requirements. It expects sites to meet them in order to get the best rankings, giving better rankings to sites that are compatible with smartphones, HTTP and now penalizing sites that don't meet page speed expectations.

It's important to remember that page speed measurements also take into account how the site works on smart devices. If your site doesn't have fast page speed for mobile devices, it will also be penalized in search engine rankings. 

Improving your Pagespeed also helps Googlebot.

When we talk about page speed, we're not just referring to the time it takes visitors to access a website. We're also thinking about the speed of search engine crawlers.

If your site's page speed is slow, this will also make it more difficult for Googlebot to access your content. This is another reason why you should work on page speed. If you have any questions about Google's access to your site, also send a site map

Page speed is becoming even more important

Google's obsession with offering the best possible user experience to site visitors means that a slower page speed on a site is likely to result in even fewer clicks and poorer rankings in the future.

Google is currently planning to announce a badging system that makes it very likely that, in the future, slow-loading sites will be labeled in search results.

The moment something like this happens, sites with slow loading speeds will immediately be at a disadvantage, as the site's page speed will become clear to them before they click.

Check your site's page speed

To help website owners adapt to this change and get a good idea of how their sites are being evaluated. Google has created Google PageSpeed insights. This tool gives users a good idea of whether their site's PageSpeed is fast enough, as well as providing some useful tips for improving their page.

How does Google evaluate Pagespeed? 

The site score is calculated by running Lighthouse to collect and analyze page data. The scoring system for this report rates 90 or above as good. A score between 50 and 90 is in need of improvement, and below 50 is bad. This report shows the site's score for mobile devices and desktops.

The data that the report collects is for debugging performance problems, but it's important to note that it's collected in a controlled environment, so if you have problems that occur only in real time you won't catch them.

Improving your site's page speed 

Here are some areas you can work on to improve your site's page speed.

Allow compression:

Compress the size of your CSS, HTML and JavaScript files so that they are less than 150 bytes.

Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML:  

remove spaces, commas and other unnecessary characters from your code. Also, remove all code comments with unnecessary formatting and unused code

Reduce redirects and broken links

Minimize the number of times you redirect pages on your site, doing so only with pages that are redirecting a significant number of traffic. Check your site frequently for broken links and correct and remove them completely.

Improve your server's response time

Make sure your site is hosted by a suitable server. The ideal server response time is less than 200 ms. Consider switching to another server if your current solution can't cope.

Optimize images

Make sure that the images on your site are no larger than necessary. With the right types of compression, you can save money and significantly reduce the size of the files, without making any noticeable difference to the way the images appear.

Optimize your site for all devices

Remember that it's not just the desktop version of your site that needs to be fast. At least half the people on the internet are using a smartphone, which is why Google uses the Pagespeed of the mobile version of a site as the ranking version. So you also need to improve the page speed of the mobile version of your site.

Experience with plug-ins

If your site's architecture is a little old, you can also try plug-ins that can speed it up and reduce code waste. Installing the Amp plug-in on your site is a great way to improve page speed for mobile visitors.

We hope these tips have given you a much better understanding of the importance of Pagespeed and some tips to make your site run a little more smoothly.

Caio Nogueira

Caio Nogueira is co-founder of UpSites and a reference in website development and SEO consultancy. With over 10 years' experience and more than 900 projects completed for brands such as KaBuM, UNIMED, USP and Nestlé, Caio stands out for his competence in digital project management.Caio has also been a guest author on influential digital marketing websites such as Neil Patel, Rock Content, Hostinger, Duda, Hostgator and Locaweb, where he has shared his expertise in SEO and content marketing.

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