Want to improve your SEO results? There are so many aspects of a website that when optimized can boost your SEO results and search engine rankings. Page speed is one of these critical aspects and directly impacts the user experience. A recent study conducted by SEO analysts suggests that websites that load quickly are likely to retain more online visitors and keep them engaged to make a purchase. Not only this, a good page loading speed can lower the bounce rates and encourage the users to stay on the site for a longer time.
It is also proven that Google prioritizes faster-loading websites in its ranking criteria. Speed is a crucial element in SEO strategy and is directly linked with user retention and happiness. This greatly boosts a website’s exposure in the SERP and brings in more traffic and conversions.
What Is Google PageSpeed Insights?
Search engine optimization uses a wide range of tools provided by Google to improve the ranking criteria, including:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- PageSpeed Insights
As the name implies, PageSpeed Insights helps an analyst to track and optimize the page loading speed of a website which can greatly help with SEO.
Do Page Speed Optimization Matter for SEO?
The answer is obviously, yes. Page speed optimization is critical for your SEO success since it allows you to maintain a fast page loading speed that can help retain traffic. Some other factors that make it important include:
- It ensures your web pages load in one or two seconds
- It ensures that your web traffic is not driven away
- It allows your site to load without any waiting
- It directly affects your ranking in Google search result
- It improves your online organic traffic retention rate
How To Use Google PageSpeed Insights For SEO?
Being a useful SEO tool, Google PageSpeed Insights can greatly optimize your page speed and help your website rank higher. It allows you to discover the weak points on your website so that you can work on them and improve.
To start with, access the tool at https://pagespeed.web.dev/. Then simply enter a URL into the area and click the Analyze button. After that, the PageSpeed Insights tool will generate a comprehensive report about your page speed.
Interpreting The PageSpeed Insight Scores
Once the PageSpeed Insights report has been generated, it’s time to check how your site is performing after interpreting the scores. A few metrics in your report that you need to know are:
Largest content full paint (LCP): The time it takes for a page to load the content on the screen.
First input delay (FID): The time it takes for page elements to respond after being clicked on (to be replaced soon by INP).
Cumulative layout shift (CLS): The amount by which the page elements shift during loading.
In addition to these, there are overall scores for factors like performance, accessibility, SEO, etc. To review your report, you can follow the below-given recommendations:
Color Coding: Instead of numbers, you can focus on color codes. PageSpeed Insights uses color coding to indicate whether the numbers you scored are good or bad.
- Green color metrics are good
- The yellow color needs improvement
- Red-colored ones are poor
Metrics: You don’t need to examine every metric in your speed performance report. Instead, concentrate on the key metrics that the report emphasizes.
Responsiveness: Mobile friendliness or responsiveness plays a critical role in examining your website’s mobile and desktop versions. Since PageSpeed Insights evaluates your website’s mobile and desktop versions independently, you need to focus on both of them to attain better results.
How To Improve PageSpeed Insights Scores?
To improve your score, you need to work on the report and the feedback generated. However, there are some steps that every site owner can take to improve their page speed optimization, including:
Cache Web Pages: Compared to loading from scratch, loading from a page with a cached version is much faster. By enabling page caching on your site, you can allow subsequent visitors of a page to utilize the cached version. One of the simplest and most efficient ways is to improve load times by using Cloudflare.
Compress Images: Heavy images and large visual files can significantly slow down the page speed. You can avoid heavy web page loading by compressing your image files. By completely removing the images, you will eliminate the sit and wait time for them.
Minify Code: There must be a lot of unneeded characters and codes all through your website’s backend. By eliminating it, you can greatly reduce the amount of code that your browser must load while opening up a web page. If your website is coded on the WordPress CMS, several plugins are available to help you accomplish the minifying code job.
Each of these actions will ensure that your pages load faster and improve your overall SEO results. For websites designed and coded on WordPress, here are some WP plugins you must invest in to improve the page loading speed. Some of the common ones you must try include:
- WP-Optimize
- W3 Total Cache
- Jetpack Boost
All the above-listed plugins are available for free. You can also consider using some paid plugins that promise more security and functionalities compared to free ones.
Conclusion
Getting in the green color that indicates the ideal page loading speed is quite hard. Other than trying the above-given strategies, you can focus on hiring an expert who specializes in SEO services in Toronto or a front-end developer who can minimize unwanted code and improve responsiveness.
Since every website is different and so is its code, make sure you follow the best SEO practices right from the start when coding a website from scratch. This will not only help you achieve reasonable page speed but also help retain your online audience and convince them to make an online purchase or conversion. In short, a page loading speed can make or break your online business success. So never take it for granted and make sure your website loads at a lightning-fast speed.