How to Increase Page Speed for SEO

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Your website’s page speed is extremely important for ranking higher on search engines like Google, retaining visitor traffic, increasing conversion rates for online stores, and much more!

Did you know that 1 in 4 visitors will abandon a website that takes longer than 4 seconds to load? Also having an extra five seconds of page load time can increase your website’s bounce rate by more than 20%, according to an article from Section.io.

With more people using mobile devices than ever before, they expect their content to load as fast as possible wherever they are. Visitors won’t wait around forever! For business owners, this could mean a loss of revenue and site traffic, but it also makes for a poor user experience.

What is Page Speed?

Page speed is the time it takes for a single page on a website to load. It’s sometimes confused with site speed, which is the time it takes collectively to load multiple pages on a website. Page speed can also be known as “time to first byte”, which is how long it takes for your browser to receive the first byte of data from the web server.

Why is Page Speed Important?

Whether you have a business or personal website, you want the user to do something, like make a purchase, sign up for a subscription, or learn more about your brand. Your website’s page speed can have a good or bad impact of the user’s perception of your site. You don’t want to lose a customer before they even have a chance to look around. The general rule is to have a page that loads within 2-4 seconds, otherwise your bounce rates and subsequently your revenue can suffer.

Popular Page Speed Tools

Two of the most popular tools for measuring your page speed performance are Google’s Page Speed Insights and GTmetrix. Google’s tool is completely free, while GTmetrix has a free and paid tier. Both tools offer metrics for mobile and desktop, as well as suggestions you can take to optimize your site. On Page Speed Insights, you will find Core Web Vitals and Page Experience as two sets of technical page metrics that Google cares about. You can learn more about LCP, FID, CLS, TBT and other Core Web Vitals to better understand how they affect your page speed and mobile friendliness.

It’s important to note that these tools will give numeric scores that will vary, based on time of day and other factors. The scores are useful, but not necessary as a key performance indicator.

Best Ways to Optimize Your Website

Choose a fast and reliable web hosting provider.

Using a fast and reliable web hosting company plays a key role in website performance. Google’s algorithm looks for fast loading websites to provide its users with a better experience, and faster websites will get improved rankings. Sparrow Leads can offer reliable web hosting packages that give your website the speed it needs. Since our focus is on local and small businesses, you get tailored customer support, allowing you to get back to more important things like growing your business. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask how we can help.

Select a lightweight theme.

It’s crucial to select a lightweight theme when using website builders like WordPress. You should aim to only get the features you need. Many of the themes you see today will have too many features for small businesses to use effectively. We can help you choose highly optimized themes that won’t require a lot of plugins. It’s better to keep things clean and simple.

Reduce and optimize your JavaScript files

Chances are JavaScript is running most of your apps and features across your website. Because of this, there will be many files that need to be optimized. Aim to only pick plugins and apps that are from reputable sources, have frequent updates, and have high user reviews. Then use a plugin or CDN, as described in more detail below.

Compress and optimize your images

Images can be one of the main reasons why your site will slow down to a crawl. What you shouldn’t do is search Google for an image, download it and upload it to your site as is. Many images you find on search engines are larger than you need and are not optimized properly, if at all. WP Optimize is an excellent plugin that will automatically compress and optimize your images as soon as you upload them. Also be sure to properly size your images based on the content you intend to use them for.

Use a caching service or plugin

Do you ever get asked a question that you immediately know the answer to? Usually this is because you’ve answered that same question many times. Caching works in a similar way. The first time a user visits your website, the server processes the request and sends it to the user. The second time the user requests the same website, it sends a cached copy that is already stored on the server. Your website will then load faster because it’s already processed and ready to view. When a new blog post or page is added to your site, the cache can be emptied at certain intervals so that new content gets served to the user.

In this article, we highly suggest a plugin called WP-Optimize that will help you reduce your JavaScript files, optimize your images, and cache your site. It’s an excellent plugin that does it all. Other popular plugins to check out are WP Rocket and WP Super Cache.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

The purpose of a CDN is to deliver content to users from a location closest to them. For example, loading images from a fast nearby server will drastically reduce load times compared to your single web server. A very well known security company, Cloudflare, offers a free and paid CDN and cache that works great with most websites. All our web hosting packages come with the option to use Cloudflare and you can easily change to another provider if you like.

Key Points

• Page speed is the time it takes for a single page on a website to load.
• 1 in 4 visitors will abandon a website that takes longer than 4 seconds to load.
• If you are a business owner, this means your bounce rate and revenue could suffer.
• Two of the most popular tools for measuring your page speed performance: Google’s Page Speed Insights and GTmetrix.
• Sparrow Leads can help you build and host a fast and high-quality website tailored to your perfect client!