Page speed is one of those very popular topics when it comes to SEO and getting your website ranked. Some people are of the opinion that it is vitally important. Others say that it is a minor factor towards your SEO campaign and doesn’t really matter. For the page speed facts – read on!
What Google Page Speed Facts say!
Google has gone on record saying that by itself it accounts for less than 1% of an overall SEO campaign. They are presently working on their mobile algorithm where it will play a larger part in a mobile website’s ranking.
What Google is not Mentioning!
What Google doesn’t mention is that slow page speed WILL increase your bounce rate dramatically! It is estimated that after 2 seconds you start to lose potential visitors to your website. A high bounce rate will lower your rankings so this means that you are losing twice with low page speed. A slightly higher ranking factor you will agree!
Any Other Reasons why Slow Page Speed is Bad?
For those of you using PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, the amount you are paying is depending on the quality of your ad. This depends on the relevance of the landing page to the ad. The Google algorithm sees a high bounce rate as an indicator that the landing page is of poor quality. This is why it costs you more for an ad coming from a lower quality page.
Is Page Speed easy to Fix?
Getting a reasonably decent page speed is not overly difficult. I am sure that many of you already know about caching. Unfortunately, this only helps you on the customer’s second visit to the website. Google webmaster tools will advise anybody who reads them. It normally recommends that by using Gzip compression on the server it can dramatically improve page loading speeds. Also, I have found that shared hosting will slow down a website. If the website is important to you, get it it’s own virtual server. It is not that much more expensive than shared hosting.I have found that these two factors will get most page speeds up over the 70’s mark with page loading times of around 2 seconds.
Still Seems like a lot of Hype?
The feeling in the SEO world is that Page Speed is going to be more important as time goes on. With updates affecting mobile rankings in the near future, and with over 70% of all website views through mobile devices it is definitely one to watch!!
If you would like a website analysis or an SEO analysis, or to discuss how to improve your website page speed or any website design or SEO Services you can contact No1 SEO Ireland here or call on 089 479 9227.
