Speed is very important for a website. It’s so important that Google has made it an actual ranking factor for their results. That is to say, the faster your website runs the better the page ranking it gets. This in turn leads to more visitors and customers for you and is why it is this month’s free website tip.
What exactly is Page Speed?
Page Speed is the speed at which an individual page loads on your website. Different pages can have different speeds due to factors such as having large images and interactive scripts. In other words, things such as slideshows, galleries, videos may slow down your website if not done efficiently.
How does this affect my rank?
Page speed is a direct ranking factor, just like your website content. In addition, speed can also affect rankings indirectly, by increasing visitor bounce rate (people leaving your site before a web page loads). Similarly, it can can reduce time users spend on your website because it is just too slow.
How can I improve my website’s speed?
There are many ways to improve your website design, but the top 3 things we would recommend are:
1. Use good quality hosting – Most website hosts only offer the bare minimum required to run the website software. A faster server will increase the speed of all parts of your website.
2. Optimise your images – Website images do not generally need to be high resolution and will slow down the load speed of your website. This can be taken care of automatically with the right configuration.
3. Compress your website pages – Compression is the process of shrinking files by replacing recurring sequences of information. Your server can be setup to do this in advance, so they are smaller and transmitted faster. The user’s browser then decompresses the smaller files.
If you would like speak to someone about implementing any of these, or further optimizing the speed of your website call 01646 682676 today. Alternatively, follow this link to sign up to our newsletter and get a free website tip every month.
