When it comes to the visibility of your business or organization’s website from a Google search perspective, speed matters. Your website’s speed plays a crucial role in Google’s ranking algorithm — a fancy way of saying the many factors that determine your search engine results. So, what exactly are we referring to when we talk about website speed?
According to Moz — a software platform that helps you increase your organic ranking — explains that a website or, more specifically, page speed or “page load time” is how fast the information on your web page fully loads.
Let’s face it. This type of reasoning makes perfect sense. We have all been in this situation, where the cellular connection on your mobile phone is not that great. We click on a website to learn more information. We wait, then wait, and wait some more, and finally, we give up and move on to another website — hoping to have a better experience.
Google understands that these scenarios, whether on a mobile device with limited capabilities or even a slow Wi-Fi network from your home office, can influence the user’s experience. That is why Google has emphasized page speeds to influence organic search rankings.
So, is your website slow or fast? How do you know? Well, the most straightforward answer is to test your site. To begin, click here, and you’ll be redirected to Google’s PageSpeed Insights page, where you will type in your website URL address and see the results. At the top of the page, you will see a score. 100 is perfect, and you can test for desktop or mobile devices.
Below are a few actionable steps that can positively influence your PageSpeed.
Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Reduce the file sizes by removing spaces and unnecessary characters that are not essential to the page.
Reduce redirects
If you have a page redirecting to another, this adds additional time waiting for your HTTP request that can ultimately slow down your PageSpeed.
Adjust image sizes
Be sure the images on your website are appropriate sizes and are compressed for the web.
Improve server response time
If your website receives a decent amount of traffic, you might want to look for performance issues (resources each page uses) that may affect the page’s download speed.
The list above is just a few of the many possible culprits that might be slowing down your website’s PageSpeed. As you’re going through Google’s PageSpeed Insights report or reading the list above, you might be wondering what all this terminology means? Not to worry, record your findings and share this information with your web developer or designer, and they should be able to help you out.
If you do not have a web developer or have any additional questions related to this topic, then please contact our Senior Developer Ben Scheribel. Ben will help you explain your report’s results while providing you with the information you need to create a better user experience for your customers.
Now you can test multiple URLs on your website
A few months after this article was published, a company called EXPERTE.com reached out to Neomark and showed us their web tool that makes it easy to test multiple URLs automatically rather than just one. All you have to do is enter a URL, and the tool crawls the website and determines the page speed scores for each subpage. The data yielded is identical to the data of Google PageSpeed Insights. This tool is free and can be used without registration. Neomark’s full-stacked developer, Ben, tried this tool and liked it. To test your website with this tool, please click here.
To learn more about Neomark’s web development services, please click here.
