You finally have a fully functional website after months of planning, studying, and spending! The design is appealing yet basic, the writing is concise and to the point, and you’re eager to see how people react. You do a brief test run before going live, only to discover that the pages aren’t loading as quickly as you’d anticipated. All of your efforts were not in vain. There is just an issue with the site or page speed.
In either case, something has to change because both of these measures are critical to your site’s performance. That waiting period will not only turn away visitors but will also harm your site’s SEO position. In this section, we’ll discuss page speed, why it’s essential, and how you can enhance it.
What Is the Definition of Page Speed?
Page speed is the time it takes for content on a certain webpage to load. This phrase is easily confused with other site optimization terms such as “site speed,” which refers to the average loading time of more than one sample page on a specific site. Page speed, on the other hand, refers to the time it takes for a single website to load. Many factors, including server quality, file sizes, picture compression, and others, ultimately impact it.
However, there are several essential distinctions to be made while discussing this statistic. Page speed may measure in a variety of ways, despite having a relatively simple description. We’ll go through three of the most typical cases here:
Time to First Byte (TTFB)
This statistic measures how long it takes for a page to begin loading.
Do you recall the white screen that occasionally shows just before a web page fully loads? The TTFB in action.
Fully Loaded Page
This statistic looks at how long it takes for 100% of the target page to load. This is the most straightforward method of determining page speed.
First Meaningful Paint/First Contextual Paint
This is the length of time required to load enough materials on a webpage to really read what’s there.
This is an essential measure since it allows users to better understand how site visitors interact with the webpage. For example, page speed insights may indicate that a blog post takes 15 seconds to load. While it may appear to be a lot of time (and it is), this page speed statistic alone does not provide adequate information.
Visitors may confront with the first relevant paint in two seconds, causing them to interact with the website immediately.
SEO and Page Speed
If you want to rank your site high in Google searches, you should work on boosting your site’s page speed. Page speed insights may provide a precise picture of how your site will perform in search engines.
To compete for that coveted place on Google’s first page, your page speed must be faster than the top ten organic page results. Otherwise, your website will be demoted to Google’s second or third page, where most searches never go.
Page speed is important to Google since it helps determine the quality of a site and the user experience. Sites that score well in this criterion receive a high rating. When page performance is optimised, it leads to more visitors from organic searches and, as a result, a more successful website overall.
While it’s very simple to explain, real-world data may help you better understand the influence of page speed on SEO. Backlinko, fortunately, did a detailed analysis that reviewed 11.8 million Google search results as well as the metrics of the top 10 pages. The study’s goal was to discover which features were shared by the top-performing sites.
As you can see, sites that take more than five seconds to load have a 90% bounce rate. With each additional second, the likelihood of someone abandoning your website before it loads increases significantly.
Another interesting conclusion of Google’s recent page performance analysis is that the great majority of sites, regardless of industry, run rather slowly.
The graph plainly shows that many websites and sites have loading times that are slower than optimal. Interestingly, websites in the technology field have one of the fastest average speeds, hovering around 11 seconds. This is roughly four times faster than the ideal loading speed of three seconds or less.
The good news is that individuals who improve website loading speeds will have no issue ranking on Google’s first page. The bad news is that the task is certainly more difficult than most people believe since many website builders appear to overlook the necessity of site performance for SEO.
