How the website loading speed affects SEO
Loading speed of a website is not only an important SEO ranking factor, but it also matters in terms of achieving a positive user experience. Reason for this is simple.
There are tons of pages on the internet containing identical or similar information, so why would you waste your precious time waiting for a page to load when you can visit another site that loads faster and provides the same (or even better) info. This is especially true when it comes to mobile users, people who browse the internet via smartphones or tablets, and are always on the move and have no time to wait for a page to load.
The following data reveals the truth:
- 73% of the smartphone users encountered a website that was too slow or wasn’t loading at all
- 47% of the internet users expect a site to load in 2 minutes or less
- 40% of the users will leave the website if it is loading for longer than 3 seconds
If your site loads too slowly, users will remember it and they will not visit your site again. Subsequently, this will lead to less traffic to your website and, ultimately, to lowering of your rankings in search engines.
We hope these are good enough reasons for you to want your site to load faster.
How can you do that?
There are a lot of parameters that affect your sites loading speed, and we will mention the most important ones that will help you with improving the user experience and ranking better in search engines.
- Image size
To improve the loading speed of your site, it is very important to reduce and optimize the image resolution, especially on your homepage.
For example, if you put 4000 x 3000 px image on your webpage, that image may be even few megabytes large and it will make your page load slowly.
Reducing image resolution in your webpage CSS file will not decrease the loading time because the image will still load in its full size. What you need to do to reduce the image resolution is to use the program like Photoshop to adjust the image dimensions to the size that you need.
That way you will reduce the “weight” of an image, and you can further optimize the page using website tools like tinypng.com. The tinypng.com website will compress your image without reducing the quality while keeping the desired dimensions.
2. Hosting
Choosing the right hosting is also one very important segment that affects the page loading speed.
When talking about hosting quality, we can simply say: you get what you pay for. For example, if you decide on getting the cheaper hosting, it is very probable that your website will be placed on a server with many other sites. In such a situation, it is possible that your website stops working thanks to other websites which may require more resources to operate. Also, security is questionable because problems that affect other pages may also affect yours.
Therefore, if your finances allow, you should always place your website on a special, dedicated server, where you will not have such problems.
3.Optimizing your homepage
A homepage is the most important part of every website and it must be unique and simple. Try to avoid using various sliders on your homepage, as well as unnecessary plugins which may require a lot of resources to operate.
4. Mobile devices
We already talked about the importance of mobile devices optimization, however, because of the loading speed we should mention that mobile users don’t have to see everything PC users see. Mobile users should only see the most important information, images, and links. Large amounts of unnecessary content will only slow the page loading speed on mobile devices.
If you are not sure if your website loads fast enough or too slow, you can check it on the following link, where you also can check all the other basic problems that slow down your website’s loading speed, and how you can fix these problems.
