When it comes to business, your website is more than just an online brochure or entertainer – it is the medium that’ll bring you customers. Customers can send their queries or make purchases through a website. And for that very reason, it’s important that your website can be crawled by the search engines so that you get a good reach. And for the sake of SEO, speed optimization is extremely important.
How SEO Works
SEO or search engine optimization is a process of involving several tasks performed to make a website appropriate for ranking on the search engine results page. There are 100-200 factors that impact your rank on SERP.
Following are some of the most essential factors:
- Relevant and reader-friendly content optimized with keywords
- Presence of images and videos
- User-friendly interface
- Website speed
While a team of content creators and website designers can take care of the first three points, website speed can be a tricky business. Let’s see how.
What Can Make Your Website Slow?
Your website can be slow due to several problems. They include the following:
- Heavy image and video files
- Unnecessary HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files
- Too many redirects
- Poor server performance
- Too many plugins
- Lack of CDN integration
- Overloaded database
You can see how technical these errors are. And so, to fix these errors, you need a skilled web developer who is well-versed with what works best for the search engines too.
Why Speed Optimization is a Factor for SEO?
You may have made the best website in your industry, but if it takes longer than 2 seconds to load, your users will go back to the search engine results page and look for something else. This increase in users leaving your website within 3 seconds of opening it is called bounce rate. Higher your bounce rate, the lower becomes your score to rank on search engines.
When a website has a poor user experience, its traffic starts reducing automatically. Users won’t revisit a website that is too slow to open. Instead, they’ll leave before your website loads in the first place. This is because people surfing on the web are in a hurry to get what they want.
So, following are the reasons why your website needs SEO speed optimization:
Impact on User Experience
An average user will wait for 3 seconds at the most for your website to load. If it takes longer, he may think something is wrong and go look for the next site. He may also get bored or impatient with your website.
Impact on Traffic and Conversions
If a user did not have a good experience the first time he visited your site, he’s not going to open it again, unless under exceptional circumstances. Even if the user has used your website before but his last experience with your website was bad, he’s least likely to revisit. Thus, both traffic and conversions automatically go down.
Impact on Bounce Rate
When you have multiple users leaving your site without exploring it, the search engine records the data in the form of a bounce rate. So, when your website is slow, most users will start leaving your website before it loads, increasing your bounce rate.
Impact on Search Engine Rankings
Search engines keep crawling and indexing thousands of websites. Your website performance is an important factor for maintaining the rank you achieve. When your bounce rate goes up, your rank goes down.
How Can SEO Speed Optimization Help?
A slow website may have caused enough damage for you. However, if you work on your website’s issues, then you can get your rank go up once again.
Search engines rank websites based on what a user may expect from a website. This largely includes relevance and aesthetics of content and a good user experience. The latter includes the speed of the website. Here’s how it works:
- Search engine crawls your website.
- It examines your website’s content, performance, traffic, and usage.
- After comparing it with competitive websites, it gives each website a rank on the search engine results page.
Even though your traffic and usage may have gone down first, if your performance has improved, it will affect your overall SEO score, thus improving your rank.
Do You Need SEO Speed Optimization?
Whether your website is made on WordPress, Shopify, or custom PHP, if you need to improve its loading speed, you’re on the right page. All you have to do is contact me and receive customized services to improve your website performance and conversions.
Which website do you have – WordPress, Shopify, or custom?