Article post by Shawn Byrne

SEO is a key player in the long-term success of businesses in the modern world. No matter what niche or industry you belong in, there is always competition. You need awesome web design and excellent off-page and on-page SEO strategy to stand out from the pack and pique the interest of consumers. Unfortunately, no matter how good your site looks or how great your content is, you will not be able to maximize the potential benefits of your website if your web pages are loading at snail’s pace.

Why is boosting your page speed important?

Not to be confused with website speed, page speed refers to the load time of a specific web page. It’s basically how fast or slow your content loads when a user visits a page on your website.

Websites with longer load times tend to have higher bounce rates and shorter average time on page, which are indicators of poor user experience. All these can lead to user dissatisfaction and negatively impact site performance and conversion rates.

Also, with page speed now a part of Google’s Core Web Vitals, Google is said to prioritize speed when ranking search results, giving faster sites SEO advantage over the slower ones.

This infographic elaborates further the importance of page speed to website performance, search engine rankings, and conversions:

What is a good page load time?

We have established that page speed is of utmost importance to a site’s performance. However, you may find it difficult to improve your website’s page speed if you don’t have a good understanding of how it works and the factors that influence it.

The optimal page load time is three seconds – even less if it’s an e-commerce site. According to Google: “Two seconds is the threshold for ecommerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half-second.” More or less 53% of users abandon websites that take more than three seconds to load.

How to Improve Your Page Load Speed

Are your web pages taking a while to load? Boost your page load speed by:

• Optimizing images
• Optimizing videos and embedded media
• Improving your web hosting efficiency
• Enabling GZIP compression
• Enabling browser caching
• Reducing the use images and graphics
• Reducing redirects
• Avoiding complicated fonts, themes, and designs
• Avoiding heavy use of widgets
• Removing unnecessary plugins or add-ons

The easiest way to find ways to improve your website is to make a mental inventory of your internet habits. What things turn you off when visiting a website? Surely, you can’t expect others to wait around for your web pages to load if you wouldn’t. Every user that visits your website is a potential sale, while every customer that leaves is a possible lost transaction.

About the Author

Shawn Byrne is the founder and CEO of SEOPhoenix.net. Shawn started his career in I.T. troubleshooting workstations, servers, and networks, then went on to doing SEO as a side project and quickly found success in ranking websites. It was easy for him to grasp not only the algorithms but also the technical side which most SEO strategists miss and neglect because of its complexities. SEO Phoenix then grew based on its own rankings and referrals.