Website Speed & How It Can Affect Your Website’s SEO

Having a website that’s optimized for search engine optimization or SEO goes beyond utilizing keywords, content, meta tags, and backlinks. Website speed is also a determining factor in your website’s SEO performance.  

Delays in page load time can negatively impact not only your SEO but also your customer engagement and conversion rates. A slow website speed affects user experience. There are numerous benefits of having a faster page speed, including improved user experience, increased page views, increased conversion rates, and reduced bounce rates. Bounce rates refer to the percentage of visitors who go to your site and leave, instead of continuing to browse all of your other pages.  

Let’s take a look at the reason your website is not ranking on Google and how you can get more organic traffic to your website. 

Page Speed vs. Site Speed

In 2010, Google included site speed and, consequently, page speed as factors in search rankings. These work as signals that are used by Google’s algorithm to determine page rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs). 

Page speed and site speed are often confused with each other, but they’re two different things.  

• Page speed can also refer to page load time, or the length of time a website takes to display content on a page. 
• Site speed refers to the page speed of several page views on a particular website. 

Aside from being used to determine page rankings on SERPs, page speed dictates user experience. This applies for both mobile and desktop users. Every second counts when it comes to page speed. Even a one- to three-second delay can result in: 

• Fewer page views 
• Decreased revenue 
• Negative audience perception 

What’s a Good Website Speed?

We know that a slow website speed can affect your rankings. But what is a good website speed?  

Two seconds. That’s the acceptable speed for e-commerce websites, according to Google. Google’s goal is under a half-second.  

A three-second delay caused a 7.9% drop in the number of articles read by a visitor. Depending on your website speed, here’s how your website fares, compared to all the other websites: 

• If your website loads within 5 seconds, then it’s faster than about 25% of sites on the web 
• If it loads in 2.9 seconds, then it’s faster than half of the sites you can find on the web 
• If it loads in under 2 seconds, or in 1.7 seconds, then your website is faster than ¾ of the sites 
• If it loads in under a second, or in 0.8 seconds, then it’s faster than around 94% of sites on the web 

How to Check Your Website Speed

There are a number of different websites that can help you check your website speed.  

One of the best and easiest tools you can use to check your website speed is Pingdom website speed test. You simply copy your website’s URL and paste it on to their search bar. Aside from analyzing your web page’s content, it also comes up with suggestions to help improve that page’s speed. 

Factors that Affect Website Speed

There are several factors that can affect how fast a web page loads. Here are some of the more common ones: 

• Heavy script use (CSS and JavaScript) 
• Large file sizes 
• Poor or mediocre coding 
• Hotlinking  
• Using a web host with subpar services and capabilities 

 How to Speed Up Your Website

There are a number of ways you can improve your website speed. These include: 

• Removing any excess images 
• Checking your website plugins and widgets, and removing the ones that aren’t used 
• Removing any old scripts that aren’t being used 
• Enabling or using file compression to reduce the size of your files 
• Reducing the number of redirects from your page to other pages, as having too many redirects can adversely affect page load times 
• Ensuring that the images on your website are optimized, meaning that they’re just at the right file size and file format 
• Utilizing a content distribution network or CDN, which helps deliver a faster and more reliable website access  

Speed Up Your Website with Hello SEO

If the tasks needed to speed up your site seem too complicated, seek help from professional SEO companies. Working with Hello SEO can help solve not only your website speed issues but also all your other SEO troubles.

Hello SEO services include: 

• Assessing your website’s performance 
• Reviewing its SEO issues 
• Addressing any issues found to improve website traffic, visibility, and Google rankings 
• Listing your business information across 40+ directory websites

How do these SEO services work?

Hello SEO will conduct the following: 

• Website health check to find any issues on speed, security, HTML tags, and more 
• Keyword research to come up with keywords that will help your website rank 
• Optimization of existing pages by implementing the keywords gathered from keyword research 
• Gather your business information and list it on 40+ directories 

Find out what Hello SEO can do for your website and your business today!