Benefits of Website Speed Optimization with Some Tips to Speed up Your Site

Hello this is Monica Thomas the  SEO & Search Marketing Manager for medresponsive.com

 This week’s “Five Minute SEO” podcast will cover the “benefits of website speed optimization with some Tips to Speed up Your Site”.

 Why does the speed of your website matter? Speed is a critical factor when it comes to helping your website rank higher in Google’s search results. If your site is loading slow, it’s very important to diagnose the reason why and fix the issues quickly. Not only will a faster site improve your organic placement but it will also help improve your user’s overall experience.

In Google’s Page Rank algorithm released in 2010, website and page speed were introduced as important ranking factors for search engine bots to assess and rank websites in their search engine results. From 2016 on, the speed at which mobile pages load became an even more critical factor for Google’s mobile search rankings. This was partially due to the increased desire of users to obtain instant results to queries. Search engine users want websites to open immediately and if a site takes too long to load, they get frustrated and move on to the next one.

The average load time for most sites is over 8 seconds and can even exceed 11 seconds. However, the best-practice benchmark is a load time that is under 3 seconds.

According to a recent article in HostGator, 53% of mobile users will leave a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load and nearly 10% of web users will bounce after 2 seconds.

Google reports that a 1-second delay in load time will decrease visitors’ satisfaction by 16% and 79% of those visitors would not buy your product or service if not satisfied by your overall website performance. Basically, slow and tedious websites are related to lack of efficiency and will not gain visitors’ trust when it comes to sharing personal and billing information.

Page load time can be improved through a variety of different methods such as:

• Removing unnecessary plug-ins and add-ons: Having unnecessary plug-ins and add-ons can reduce your website speed a lot.
• Optimize your Cache: Avoid unnecessary server requests by ensuring that your mobile browser uses local memory to cache resources.
• Compress images: Large images are the biggest reason for slow page loading. To fix this issue, compression can save an average of 50% or more on image size by using simple compression tools.
• Reduce redirects: Even though redirects are necessary especially when you move and delete pages and are the best way to eliminate issues with broken links, having too many of them can create additional HTTP requests, which can negatively impact speed, particularly on mobile devices.
• Minimize JavaScript & style sheets: Carry out minification, the process of removing all needless characters from source code without changing its functionality to speed up your website.

 Researching and understanding page speed optimization and defining the right strategies for improvement can often be tricky and time-consuming. The Tech, Web Design and Search Marketing team here at MedResponsive can help you with any of your page speed, SEO, web design or internet marketing needs. Please contact us via phone or email with any questions. Have a great day or evening! Thank you for listening!