Site Speed Is Key for SEO in 2019 (and Beyond)
How fast your site loads has an impact on
your results. Period.
In fact, if your site doesn't load in just over the time it took
you get to "period," you could lose visitors. That's right: Today's
website visitors are looking
for instant gratification. They don't have the
patience to wait for your website, no matter how great it might be when it
finally does load.
A mere two seconds.
Think about it in terms of a race: If you've ever watched
swimming or sprint event, a two-second differential can actually seem like a
long time. Swimmers in a 200-meter event are attempting to shave fractions of a
second off their race times; two seconds can mean the difference between first
place and 16th place.
Now, think about it in terms of your own Web browsing
experiences. How often have you clicked on a search result and then backtracked
because the site didn't load quickly? A lot? Yes, that's common.
For all the good SEO you might have, and for all the top
rankings you may have achieved, if your visitor leaves before they've seen your
valuable content or feature-rich website, what good are those rankings to you,
anyway?
In 2019, site speed is the name of the SEO game.
If your website doesn't load in the time it took you to say
that, you may have just lost the race, even if you have a top Google result.
And, in the long run, your website's ranking could start to decrease based on
your poorly performing website speed.
Just one second could
end up costing you a lot:
- Walmart.com achieved a 2%
increase in conversions when
the speed of its website was reduced by one second.
- When the site speed for Amazon
increased by 0.1 second, the result was a 1% decrease in
sales.
Every millisecond
matters in website performance. We can say Web visitors don't have patience any
longer, but they've been trained not to by websites that perform well and fast.
Make Site Speed Your
SEO Goal for 2019
What You Can Do
Improving site speed
is relatively easy. Various things can be done to improve your overall website
speed, including the following:
- Ensure you are hosted on a
quality server.
- Reduce your server response
time.
- Use server compression and/or
browser caching.
- Prioritize your visible
content.
- Optimize your images.
- Optimize your code and scripts.
- Consider a content delivery
network.
Site Speed and Google
As Google moves
toward mobile-first
search results, how fast your site loads is
one very important factor in ranking.
Poor-performing websites may find their SEO results are drastically reduced in
2019.
Why does Google care
about site speed? Well, it wants to deliver the best search results for any
particular query. That's the key to remaining the number one search engine.
Accordingly, it needs to continually improve the search results it delivers. If
visitors bounce back to Google after clicking on a result, that means they did
not find what they were looking for.
In addition, the
faster a site loads, the more pages Google can crawl, which means more pages
properly indexed in search results. When your site loads fast, Google likes
that and the Web visitor likes that. It really is that simple.
In fact, site speed
exudes confidence.
If a site doesn't load
fast enough, visitors subconsciously begin to lose confidence in it. The
website begins to lose its authority in the marketplace, and customers become
impatient and grumpy.
A happy customer, on
the other hand, is more likely to convert, and site speed is a huge part of
keeping a customer happy.
The Benefits of a Fast
Website
A fast website is key
to conversions. Here's why. A fast website has...
- Better indexing, and that means
it will perform better in search engine results.
- Better search results bring in
more targeted traffic.
- Targeted traffic that finds
what it's looking for results in loyal visitors.
- Loyal visitors increase
conversion rates.
- Increased conversions results
in more sales.
- More sales mean improved
revenue for you.
- Your improved revenue means a
higher return on investment.
Need to Increase Sales
in 2019? Site Speed Is Key!
Across the Internet,
all SEO experts and Web developers worth their experience are talking about
site speed. It is a white hat SEO factor that cannot be ignored in 2019—and
beyond.
A Web Evolution
As the Internet has
evolved, so too has Web design. Remember the websites of the early days? They
seemed innovative back then. But then came a variety of features that we never
could have imagined. Suddenly, the more a website could do, the better it
became. Shopping online? Now that was a great invention!
All of those
innovations pushed Web developers to creating more features. Now, the goal is
to have a feature-rich website without the time-consuming load bloat—a marriage
between simplicity and complexity.
Again, you could have
the best features, the best content, and the best images on the Internet, but
if your visitor won't wait for your website to load... what's the point?
Website Engagement
Something that goes
hand-in-hand with website performance and site speed is engagement. It is the
other white hat SEO factor that is key in 2019. And, it has a lot to do with
site speed. That's because a website needs to be user friendly if it's going to
engage visitors well. Once your site loads, you want to ensure a visitor
"sticks" with your content. By improving the experience of users when
they're visiting a website, you are further increasing your chances of success.
How Fast Is Your
Website?
There are a variety of
tools to check the speed of a website on first-load. Here are some of
recommendations:
We also know that over
time some features can slow down. So keep in mind that properly maintaining
your website also helps with speeding it up.
The next time you're
browsing around online, think about how many websites you're jumping back from
because they aren't loading fast enough for you. Though it's easy to ask a Web
visitor to have more patience, it's a lot easier to address the speed issues in
the first place.
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