Once you have taken steps to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly, the next logical step is optimizing your site to ensure both mobile and desktop pages load within the shortest possible time. Otherwise, all your SEO efforts will be for nothing.
Importance of Page Speed to Google
Google announced in 2010 that a site’s loading is one of the factors it takes into account to determine ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). From that time, the company has worked to introduce specific tools to enable webmasters determine their sites’ page speed to improve loading speeds. Some of these include:
- Page Speed Insights – requires you to enter a site’s URL and you’ll see the speed score for mobile as well as desktop, including pointers to help fix various elements causing slower loading speeds.
- Site Speed reports in Google Analytics – the reports are found within the Behavior Section, and provide information on redirection, page load, domain lookup, page download, server connection and server response. It also includes site speed reports in relation to different pages, browsers and countries.
- YSlow and WebPage Test – Google recommends these tests in addition to its own tools, as well as the recommendations contained in the Google Search Console Technical Guidelines.
Why Page Speed matters to you
Even if your page loading speed is not significant enough to alter your ranking on SERPs, it directly contributes to user experience, which is something you are concerned about. In particular, studies reveal the following:
- A second’s increase in page load time can drop page views by 11%, customer satisfaction by 16% and conversions by 7%.
- 47% of users don’t intend to wait more than two sends for pages to load. Also, 88% of users who have a dissatisfying experience because of slow page-load time are unlikely to buy from that site in future and a third of them will tell friends about the dissatisfying experience.
- 18% of mobile users abort web pages that do not load in 5 seconds or less and 30% abandon those that load in more than 10 seconds.
This is why you need to ensure your page has the fastest loading time possible. Even with a high ranking for your target keywords, all your efforts go to waste if slow page loading speeds turns your traffic away.
