Here’s everything you need to know
What is page speed optimisation?
While website owners are often so preoccupied with the look of their site and what they think users want, they often overlook the one thing that can significantly impact their popularity, page speed.
One of the reasons why we love the internet so much is the speed at which we get our information. Here are some supernerdy stats that back this up
Customers-A fickle lot
While some businesses focus their efforts on creating elaborate user interfaces (UIs) chock full of graphical elements, music etc. Page speed is greatly affected by these designs and customers end up moving onto other sites out of impatience.
Google’s new update
With Google’s new update launched in June 2021, website page speed optimisation is more relevant than ever. Why? Google is continually improving user experience with its interface, and from June will prioritise websites and businesses with loading times within Google’s Guidelines. What are Google’s Guidelines, you ask? The performance on a page is highly dependent on its loading time.
According to Google Guidelines, a poor score is between 0 to 49, an average score is between 50 and 89, and a good score is 90+. The new update means that Google’s algorithm on page ranks will favour site speed and subsequently page speed. It’s important to stay ahead of the game.
Web page speed optimisation
This should be a priority for any website owner when it comes to getting customers to their site.
Did you know? The speed of your site greatly affects your site’s SEO (search engine optimisation) and bounce rate. What are bounce rates, you ask? Bounce rates are calculated as the number of single-page sessions of zero-second duration divided by the total number of page sessions on your website. A higher number of zero-second page hits, means people are dropping off before the site loads up.
The best tool to see your page speed is Google PageSpeed Insights. Even if your website provider comes with a tool to determine your page speed, Google’s tool directly determines how Google calculates page rank for SEO.
Factors that greatly impact page speed optimisation:
- Unoptimised images
- File size minification
- Web host efficiency
- The use of apps, such as Flash
- Overly complicated themes and designs
- Embedded media such as videos pulled from other sites
- Heavy widget use
All of these can play a big part in your page speed. It also matters where you host your website. Not all hosts are created equal. Sometimes a cheap web hosting can be more costly for page speed.
Mobile page speed optimisation
With mobile phone use now being one of the dominant methods of viewing a website, mobile page speed is incredibly important. A handy tip, mobile pages are considered separately for SEO results. The mobile version of your site won’t automatically inherit the main site’s SEO ranking.
This means that website owners need to pay attention to their mobile site speed as much as they do web speed! Mobile phone usage is on the rise, especially for online usage.
Bottom Line
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Think about your own browsing habits and how frustrating it is when a page takes too long to load. Have you ever dropped off completely when that’s happened? If we’re talking sales, then that’s potentially a sale lost for every customer that drops off the website.
