What is Page Speed?
Page Speed is an important SEO factor that helps achieve better rankings in search engines such as Google but also improved conversion rates.
Page speed is often measured as either:
Page Load Time – the time taken to fully load all the content on the page
Sever Responsive Time – often referred to as “the time to first byte”, this is the time taken for the browser to receive the first byte of data from your web server
Both metrics are import measures of Page Speed and taken into consideration when performing SEO. In both cases, the faster your page performs, the better the outcome.
Page Speed has an obvious impact on user experience which Google takes into account when ranking pages. Slow pages will result in frustrated visitors who will likely end up leaving the website in question (rather than waiting for pages to load). User behaviour such as this is easy to spot in tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Recently, Google have introduced new metrics for analysis user experience which is closely linked to page speed. These new metrics are called Core Web Vitals and are confirmed as a ranking factor.
How to improve Page Speed?
Page Speed is affected by a number of different technical elements. We’ve listed a few ways you can improve Page Speed times below:
Optimise Images
In general, images make up the majority of the web and we often use several images on a single page. Optimising images can help reduce Page Speed by reducing the size of the page being loaded. Using the right file formats and lossless compression are simple methods to optimise images.
Minify CSS, Javascript and HTML
Optimising your website code is another way to improve Page Speed. Minifying files involves removing spaces, commas and other unnecessary characters from code in order to reduce their size as much as possible. Don’t worry, this shouldn’t be a manual task and there are lots of tools available to help minify files.
Server Response Time
Improving your server response time can be a challenge depending on traffic levels and the functionality available on your website. Different hosting solutions will have different performance levels and we’d advise always avoid shared hosting for professional websites. A good server response time is considered to be anything below 200ms – if yours is higher than this you’ll need to investigate and resolve any issues causing poor performance.