Why Website Speed is important for SEO?

These days, it seems like everyone is trying to put their website on the map—and you should be too. If you are a website owner, whether your goal is to promote a brand new product or share fun and engaging content, the secret to success is traffic. To generate traffic, many website owners and marketing teams alike are relying on search engine optimization (SEO)—and while many people are making successful content strategies, a lot of people are overlooking one very important part: website speed.

In this post, we will discuss the importance of website speed for your website’s overall SEO efforts.

What Is Website Speed?

Website speed, often referred to as load speed, is the actual measurement of how long it takes for your website to load. When you visit a  website and tap or click something on the screen, you expect it to do something, right? Website speed is a measurement that tells us how long it takes to fulfill your request completely. It shows us just how responsive a website is and how quickly the new information can be presented after a user requests it. This measurement focuses on the amount of time that it takes to load every part of a web page. It is also surprisingly important.

Why Is Web Page Speed So Important?

Fast website speed is one of the more valuable features that a website can offer. Most users, whether they realize it or not, are incredibly impatient. The average user can physically feel it when a website loads slowly, even if the page only takes a few seconds. While this might seem dramatic, the data shows that most people will abandon a website entirely if the page takes more than a few seconds to load.

How Does This Play Into Search Engine Optimization?

If you are familiar with SEO practices, you know that they are largely focused on helping your website to appeal to search engines like Google.

Website speed is something that Google checks on every web page. Why? Because Google has the same data that we all have access to and more. They know how much your users care about website speed and don’t want to promote content with a poor user experience. Search engines are notoriously critical of website speed for this reason—it is their way of looking out for their users, as well as yours.

When search engines see a slow website, they already know that it will disappoint visitors. Even if you have the best website in the world, if it is slow, most users won’t wait around to find out. If the majority of people are going to pass on your website because of the loading experience, search engines know that it will be more or less useless as a top search result.

You can do everything right on your page and search engines will still penalize you for slow load speeds. It really is that important, even if it seems trivial on the surface.

What Causes Slower Website Speeds?

If you are relying on website builders or simply had a website built without signing up for ongoing maintenance with the developer, you might find yourself dealing with slow website speeds unintentionally. This is likely because you are not adhering to certain best practices that contribute to delays in your overall load times. It is a very easy mistake to make, particularly for those who are not up to speed on the technical side of managing a website.

There are a few different issues that can contribute to slower website speeds. Some of them will be easier for you to manage than others. A common issue is the use of large and unoptimized images. Certain images can take a long amount of time to load, which will slow your overall website speed and can make your website look slow and clunky. Failing to cache your website appropriately can also lead to slower website speeds – e-commerce websites can suffer greatly from this as they use lots of images.

Caching involves preserving certain website elements and is a great way to ensure that your website and all of its consistent information is always ready to load immediately. Beyond these, it is always possible that there is something incorrect or inefficient with the actual code in your website. Either way, you will want to do some cleanup to boost those website speeds.

How To Improve Website Speeds

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As a website owner, there are some steps that you can take to boost these speeds, but if you’re not tech-savvy, it is almost always best to partner with a professional web developer. Professionals have access to the knowledge and tools to individually locate any problems on your website and adjust your website accordingly. By using tools like NitroPack, (in case you want to try them out they gave a coupon code “foureyesweb”) you can increase the speed and efficiency of your website and maintain it for the foreseeable future.

Systems focused on website speed optimization make it easy for your website to get a nice speed boost—and fast. These tools are designed to help with caching, image optimization, and code optimization. Even better, certain tools can help to optimize both the desktop and mobile versions of your website, helping your website to perform better across the board. It might seem a little silly to let technology fix your website, but it really can provide wonderful results that immediately improve your website performance.