But how exactly does website page speed affect search rankings and why does it matter? And, if a website is particularly sluggish, what can be done to improve its pace and enhance its potential to rank highly in page searches? With Banc’s know-how of technical SEO, we’ll answer this triad of enquiries over the course of this very article.
How does page speed affect search rankings?
First off, it’s worth noting that Google may measure Time to First Byte (TFFB) when it considers page speed, i.e. the duration of time from the user’s browser making a HTTP request to the first byte of information that’s returned by the server. It’s a matter of milliseconds usually, but Google feels it necessary to begin measuring website page speed at this point. In fact, the tech giant conducted a study that showed slowing down the search results page by 100 to 400 milliseconds – a trifling amount by anyone’s watch – had a noticeable impact on the number of searches per user. According to Google, your website’s TTFB should be 200 milliseconds or less.
Why does this matter?
With Google looking to make the web more mobile-friendly, mobile-first indexing is just around the corner. “What’s mobile-first indexing?” we hear you ask. It’s fairly simple. It means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, using it as the baseline for how they determine rankings on both mobiles and desktop. As a result, the importance of website page speed increases accordingly. If your site doesn’t have a mobile equivalent, the desktop site can still be included.
How to improve your website page speed
Tools such as Lighthouse, Pagespeed Insights, GTMetrix and WebPageTest allow us to glean information on how pages are loaded, providing us with valuable insights on how to reduce page speed in the process. Using insights from the tools above, you can get an idea of what needs to boost the speed of your web pages.
Here are some of the most common ways to reduce load times and improve page speeds
- Leverage browser caching – Browsers such as Chrome, Firefox and Edge cache large amounts of information like Javascript files, stylesheets and images, so when a user revisits a site, it doesn’t have to reload the entire page. By setting an expiry date within the HTTP header, it allows us to control how long we want information to be cached.
- Improve server response time – Server response times tend to be affected by the amount of traffic a site receives, the resources each page uses, the software the server uses and the hosting solutions being used. To improve this, further research into how the server is performing may be necessary, clearing up any issues with slow routing or slow databases in order to clarify if these affect website page speed.
- Enable compression – CSS and Javascript files can sometimes cause a large load time, and more so for big inline individual files being used on a site. By compressing these files into one chunk, the overall size of these files gets pared down and the load time decreases as a result.
- Use a content distribution network (CDN) – CDNs, such as Cloudflare, are networks of servers that are used to distribute the load of delivering content. Essentially, copies of a site are stored at a range of geographically diverse data centres so that users have faster and more reliable access to a given site
- Optimise images – The size and file format of images used on a site can adversely slow it down. Sometimes this is because of extra data embedded in the comments or a lack of compression. Newer, next-gen image types, like WebP, JPEG 2000 and JPEG XR, can reduce the size of files in a big way.
- Miscellaneous factors – A cluttered page will only serve to clog up your site’s page loads, so be mindful of any superfluous features which might be responsible. External embedded media, like videos, might look great and serve a purpose but can increase load times. Likewise, plugins and apps, when used on unoptimized browsers, can drastically slow down your page speed. Consider the use of widgets; are they helpful or just window dressing that may be negatively impacting your page?
