Page Loading Speed and SEO

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As the name itself suggests, page speed is the time taken by a website to load. A lot of factors such as the file size of the page, webserver of the website, image size compression, and more play a major role in the page loading speed of a website.
From a fully loaded page that considers the time taken for a webpage's content to load completely to time to the first byte, which considers the time consumed by a webpage to initiate the loading process, there are a lot of ways you can opt for deciphering the page loading speed of your website.
Also, you can measure the page speed by analyzing the first contextual paint, i.e., time taken by a webpage to load sufficient resources that help a visitor read the basic content of the webpage.

Importance of Page Loading Speed

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Fast page loading speed paves the avenue for a successful SEO campaign. After all, Google has been using this metric in its search ranking algorithm since April 2010.
In fact, from July 2018, Google made page loading speed ranking criteria for mobile searches too.
Simply put, you need a fast-loading webpage to improve your Google rankings and make your SEO campaign successful.

How Page Loading Speed Affects Visibility?

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According to a study by Google, the bounce rate of your website can increase by more than 30% if the page load time of your website increases from 1 second to 3 seconds. Here's what Google has to say about page load time and bounce rate:
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If your web page faces a delayed response of even 1 second, it can lead to a 7% reduction in your website's conversion rates.
Also, since Google considers page loading speed as a search engine ranking criteria, it becomes imperative to ensure that the page loading speed of your website remains fast so that users can find your website easily.

1. Provides High-End User Experience

Fast page loading speed ensures a better user experience. In other words, when a page loads faster, the probability of a user staying on your website becomes more, thereby increasing visibility and the chances of a user's conversion while decreasing the bounce rate.

2. Streamlines Social Ads

Your social ads also get affected because of the page loading speed. For instance, if you have placed your ad on Facebook, you need to ensure that you offer your users impeccable site speed.
Facebook underwent an algorithmic transformation in 2017, where it made the user experience its priority. This means that Facebook will give preference and provide visibility to such ads in its news feed, providing good speed and user experience.

3. Improves Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

PPC, whose effectiveness is determined by quality score, is also affected by page loading speed. The quality score considers how well Google perceives your website's landing page to a relevant keyword.
A slow site speed will indicate a poor user experience and reduce your quality score and vice versa. It is important to have a good quality score to show in the top positions of SERPs.
You can have a high-quality score by making sure the loading speed of your webpage is high. It will help you position your ads better and increase their visibility and lead to lower cost per click.

What Is the Ideal Page Loading Speed?

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As already mentioned above, even a single-second delay in page loading can lead to a loss of 7% in conversion. Apart from it, this delay can also decrease customer gratification by 16%. It can also lead to a decrease of 11% in page views.
A case study on Walmart showed how conversions declined drastically as the page load time increased from 1 second to 4 seconds. Also, when Walmart improved its page loading speed by 1 second, it witnessed an increase of 2% in conversions.
No wonder maintaining an ideal page loading speed is critical for the success of a business and its SEO campaign!
While the websites in the United States have an average page loading speed of 15 seconds, the top-ranking websites on Google have an average page loading speed of 3 seconds.
Moreover, with 40% of users abandoning a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, an increase in page loading speed can help you accelerate your website traffic instantly.
However, you must know that the website speed varies from one user to another, but the average page speed is also different for various industries. Take a look:
Source
So, you must consider the industry you are working in and take optimum steps to maintain an ideal page loading speed.

Tips to Increase Page Loading Speed

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You can improve your website's performance while giving a seamless user experience to your visitors by improving the page loading speed of your website in the following ways:

1. Try to Reduce HTTP Requests

You must know that the lower the number of HTTP requests, the faster your website's speed. Simply put, when a user visits your website, the browser goes ahead and makes a lot of file requests.
These HTTP requests, in turn, can have a significant effect on your website. Let’s take a look at a few of the many ways that can help you decrease HTTP requests for your website:

2. Remove Unnecessary Images

You can reduce the HTTP requests of your website by minimizing the number of files and images that your website has to load. You can do so by cleaning the unnecessary images present in your media library. You should also delete redundant embedded videos and third-party social media plugins.

3. Decrease Image Size

After deleting the unnecessary images, the next step is to compress the file size of such images that you need to use on your websites.
Plugins such as WP Smush plugin and EWWW optimizer are a few of the many plugins that you can use to reduce the size of your images. Also, it is always good to use images that are website-friendly.
For instance, using .jpg images instead of .webp is recommended. Further, it is advisable to work towards image caching to minimize the server's loading time while improving the website speed.

4. Utilize Lazy Loading Technique

As mentioned already, when a visitor comes to your website, your site makes HTTP requests for all the images and the chances of your website slowing down becomes higher.
This is where the lazy loading technique can come in handy. Instead of sending unnecessary HTTP requests for loading all the images on a webpage, the lazy loading technique sends requests solely when a visitor scrolls down to a particular image on your website.
As a result, it improves the page loading speed considerably.

5. Work on File Minification and Combination

The CSS and JavaScript code might slow down your page loading speed. However, you can easily optimize these codes by minifying them.
Code minification works towards deleting unnecessary characters such as white space, inline comments, and more CSS and JavaScript files.
They do improve the readability of your website but are of no other use. Once these excess characters are removed, your website's bandwidth increases along with an increase in your page loading speed.

6. Leverage CSS Minifier

You can easily compress the CSS codes present on your website with the help of the tool CSS minifier. It is a free tool that compresses CSS files automatically. You are just required to copy and paste the code in the input field option, choose a desirable compression level, and click on the ‘minify’ icon.
The whole process of code minification can take a few seconds or a minute. Once the code is minified, you can copy it back to your Content Management System [CMS] or File Transfer Protocol [FTP].

7. Use Asynchronous Loading for JavaScript

While CSS can be minified with ease, minifying JavaScript is a little difficult. However, you can do it smoothly if you implement asynchronous code loading. It makes the loading of functions easy. That’s the reason it is also referred to as lazy loading.
You can use asynchronous loading by adding the “async” tag in the .js file in your website’s HTML source code.

#1 Work on JavaScript Files Combination

JavaScript can also be optimized by combining files on a single page. It would decrease the number of HTTP requests, thereby improving the page loading speed of your website.

#2 Make Use of JSCompress

You can compress the JavaScript files through JSCompress. All you need to do is paste the code in the input field option and click on the “compress JavaScript” icon. Further, you are required to click on the “output” tab and see the JavaScript that you compressed.

#3 Get Rid of Redundant Codes

Also known as duplicate codes, redundant codes are such page elements removed or deleted, making the code remain unused. Such codes can easily be found through the inbuilt developer tools present within Google chrome.
You can enable these tools by clicking on the main menu, choosing the “more tools” option, and finally clicking on “developer tools.”
Once the developer tools get activated, click on the “more tools” section from the setting menu. It will open the “coverage” tab present in the developer console.
Further, click on the “instrument coverage” option for beginning the test. After the test is completed, a list of codes will appear and the bytes that remain unused.
You can then remove these redundant codes and give your visitors a smooth user experience with an increased website page loading speed.

8. Reduce First Byte Time

Improving user experience and increasing your Google page ranking can become easy if you can decrease your website’s time to first byte [TTFB].
As the name itself suggests, TTFB is the time taken to load the first byte of data that appears when a user places a request with the browser, such as clicking on a link or typing a URL in the address bar of your website.
According to Google Insights, an ideal TTFB ranges under 200ms. You can improve your website’s TTFB by implementing the following steps:

#1 Improve DNS Resolve

Domain Name System (DNS) resolve translates domain names into IP addresses that machines can easily comprehend. If you are witnessing slower resolve times, it can decrease your TTFB. You can improve your DNS resolve timing by analyzing your DNS settings. If the issue persists, consider changing your DNS provider.

#2 Upgrade Web Hosting

To improve your visitor’s user experience through fast TTFB, it is important to have access to top-notch web hosting. You must ensure that your web hosting company isn’t suffering from overworked servers and congested networks.
Your web hosting company should strive towards upgrading your services consistently.
If they don’t do so, you should opt for a different provider. You can choose from various web hosting services, including shared web hosting, virtual private servers, cloud hosting, and dedicated hosting.

#3 Increase Backend Performance

You must optimize your servers to improve the backend performance of your website. You can do so by normalizing and indexing your website’s database.
Normalizing your database will help you get rid of redundant data. This, in turn, will decrease the overall size of the database and facilitate the better performance of your website. Further, indexing your database will assist it in replying to queries faster.
Database indexing tells the database about the exact location of columns in the tables, thereby helping the database save time from evaluating every column to find the correct one. Therefore, if you witness your database queries taking longer to answer, you must properly index them.

#4 Work on Server-Side Caching

You can keep your TTFB at a minimum with the help of server-side caching. The database queries and processor load can be reduced through server-side caching by making extensively used data and files readily available in the server’s cache.

#5 Come up with External Monitoring

Apart from optimizing your TTFB, it is critical to ensure that it remains consistent throughout. The changes in your website’s hardware, frequent software, and site updates can instantly increase your TTFB.
You can evaluate TTFB with the help of these tools:

• Google Chrome browser Inspect tool
• Gtmetrix.com
• Webpagetest.org
• Performance.sucuri.net
• Tools.keycdn.com/performance

9. Leverage Content Delivery Network (CDN)

You can speed up the delivery of the content available on the internet with the help of a CDN.
With its ability to distribute servers based on geography, CDN instantly transfers the assets required to load content such as HTML pages, images, videos, and JavaScript files. This, in turn, improves the website speed considerably.
In other words, CDN works as a network located in various global areas. Further, CDN stores the cached content on your website and displays it to your website's visitors from a server in the visitor's closest physical proximity.
As a result, it reduces network latency and lowers TTFBs, and improves page loading speed. Let's take an in-depth look at how a CDN functions:

• A CDN places the servers at various Internet Exchange Points (IXPS) residing between different networks.
• These exchange points serve as primary locations for internet providers to connect and access the traffic arriving on their respective networks.
• Since these connections are intricately and strongly connected locations, it considerably reduces the transit time while delivering high-speed data.
• Apart from placing servers in IXPs, CDN also makes various optimizations on data transfers being done on a standard client or server.

10. Work on Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) Delivery Optimization

CSS helps you in setting up the style and format requirements on your website. From font and background color to font size, it sets all the elements of your web page. CSS is broadly categorized into three groups:

#1 Inline CSS

You can style a particular HTML element with the help of inline CSS. You can use this style by including the style attribute to every HTML tag. However, since each HTML tag requires individual styling, managing your website through inline CSS can be time-consuming.

#2 Internal CSS

Internal CSS is ideal for styling a single webpage. All you need to do is include ‹style> tag in the ‹head> section of the HTML document. However, since internal CSS requires you to put CSS rules on your website's pages, it becomes cumbersome to leverage this style.

#3 External CSS

It helps you transform your whole website through a single CSS file edit. You can use external CSS by creating a new .CSS file with the help of a text editor. Further, you need to add the style rules and incorporate a reference to your external .CSS file after the ‹title> tag.
You can optimize your CSS delivery by including all the CSS styles in an external stylesheet. It wouldn't only decrease the size of your code and create a smaller number of duplicate codes.
Moreover, it is advisable to use a single external CSS stylesheet to reduce HTTP requests, thereby improving the page loading speed.

11. Steer Clear of Unnecessary Plugins

From customized functionality and cleaning up your code to providing customer gratification through improved user experience, plugins can improve your website's functionality.
However, if you have installed a lot of plugins, it might create issues such as slow speed, security flaws, and website crashes for your website.
Therefore, it becomes imperative to analyze your plugins regularly and remove the ones that are obsolete, inefficient, and have incorrect configurations. It wouldn't only improve your website's speed but also make website maintenance easier for you.
Here are a few steps that you can use to evaluate your website's plugins:

#1 Carry Out Plugin Tests

You can use a plugin performance profiler to analyze your plugins and find the ones creating trouble. All you need to do is install this plugin, move to the settings page, and carry a website scan.
Once you have scanned your website, you will get a detailed report about each plugin on your website and its performance. The report will contain the load time of each of the plugins.
Once you find out which plugins are slowing down your website, you can easily uninstall, deactivate, or delete them.

#2 Identify Plugins With Same Functionalities

If your website has plugins that serve similar purposes, it is better to eliminate one of them and improve your website's speed.
For instance, if you have a WordPress website with plugins such as WP Rocket and WP Total Cache installed, you can delete one of them since they serve similar purposes.
Further, you can also analyze the features of both the plugins and find out if a single plugin can do all the work. You can then enable the other plugin features in the plugin you choose to stick with and delete the former one.

#3 Opt for Manual Work

If you have experience and can do a few website tasks manually, you should delete the plugins for the same.
For instance, if you use a plugin to add your Google Analytics tracking code to your website's header, you can uninstall the plugin and enter it into your website's header manually through your website's FTP.

12. Decrease Redirects

Redirects provide a seamless browsing experience to users by preventing users' access to such web pages updated and redirecting them to another location on the website.
Before we move further, let's find out what are the different types of redirects:

301

Such redirects indicate that the web page that a user is searching has been permanently moved to a new location. It also provides the user with the address of the new location. Such redirects are common for website domain changes and redirecting non-existent or redundant pages to new URLs.

302

These redirects can be used when updating your website and don't want the user to access it. Such redirects move the user to a different web page.

304

Such redirects let you know if the resource that was requested earlier has been changed since the last request or remains the same. It further sends the request to extract the content from the cache instead of the server.
Sure, redirects can help you improve your visitor’s user experience, but redirects can create latency to the website page load time. Hence, if your website has a lot of redirects, it might lower the page speed of your website.
You can reduce the redirects on your webpage through following ways:

#1 Get Away With Redundant Redirects

You should include redirects only when it is necessary. It will considerably improve your website's page loading speed.

#2 Remove Chain Redirects

Such redirects are created when one URL is combined with another URL. With each URL added, your web page's latency increases, negatively affecting the page speed and SEO.

#3 Remove Old Redirects

You must analyze your website's redirects regularly. It will help you get hold of old redirects that might be overlapping with new URLs. While you must retain such old redirects that bring huge traffic, removing such old redirects which no longer serve their purpose should be your priority.

13. Minimize External Scripts

It is important to find out all the external scripts that are slowing down your website. Chrome's Developer tools will give you a precise idea about all the external scripts piling up the HTTP requests and slowing your website.
Once you know which external scripts are unnecessary, you can remove and uninstall them.
For instance, if your website has a Facebook share button, it will increase the HTTP requests made by your website. So, if it is not needed, you must remove it.

14. Analyze Speed Over Time

You must check your website's load time regularly. It will let you know which factors are slowing down your website and further help you take corrective measures wherever needed. Further, it is also critical to monitor your website’s loading speed on mobile devices.
After all, mobile page loading speed and the user experience it provides make for an important ranking factor for Google.
Google's PageSpeed Insights is a great tool to fix desktop and mobile page loading speed issues. With the help of the links provided by Google, you can easily correct the issues by making the required changes.
You can also check the mobile page speed by using Google's Test My Site tool.
Putting your URL in the search bar will show your website's average page load time on a 3G network. It will also give you an idea about the visitors who left your website because of the slow loading speed.

15. Make Way for AMP Integration

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) improve the loading speed of web pages on mobile.
Webpages with AMP integration load instantly by restricting access to HTML, CSS files, and JavaScript while giving users a seamless browsing experience.
A study done by Chartbeat revealed that websites could increase their traffic by 16% with the help of AMP.
An AMP integrated webpage comes with an indicator that depicts a lightning bolt in the corner. Now, let’s see how AMP works. It is made up of 3 components:

#1 AMP HTML

AMP HTML has regular HTML tags, which come with certain restrictions for improved performance. There are AMP-specific tags, too, customized to implement common tag patterns seamlessly.

#2 AMP JavaScript

This AMP implements practices such as inline CSS, font triggering, and more to facilitate the fast rendering of web pages. It also disables slow-performing CSS selectors and leverages sandboxing techniques for all iframes to improve website performance.

#3 AMP Cache

The AMP cache fetches all the AMP HTML pages. It further caches these pages and accelerates page performance.
The AMPs mentioned above work together and help you load your website's pages instantly.
The List of Tools You Can Use to Check Page Loading Speed
You can easily check your webpage's speed by using the below tools mentioned. Apart from helping you improve user experience; these tools will also assist you in optimizing your websites by taking corrective measures for issues pertaining to slow websites. Let's see what these tools are all about:

The List of Tools You Can Use to Check Page Loading Speed

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1. GTmetrix

This tool lets you test your website in various locations and browsers. To be precise, with GTmetrix, you can analyze your website from 22 different locations and 65 web servers.
It also gives you a detailed report of your website's key performance indicators (KPIs) and updates you with various performance milestones such as total blocking time and cumulative layout shift.
Further, GTmetrix lets you conduct a weekly and monthly test to ensure that your website is well optimized for best performance. You can also extract graphical results in the form of web vitals, page size, performance score, and page timings. It also lets you optimize your website for mobile devices.
While the functions mentioned above are free to use, the advanced features of GTmetrix are accessible for PRO users and come with a fee.
These features include changing the screen resolution to find out your webpage's response layout, recording your page load details for finding errors, and more.
Other pro features include ad blocking, connection throttling, cookie sessions, HTTP authentication, and URL filtering.

2. Webpage Test

This testing tool helps you analyze your website speed from multiple locations across the globe. It gives you accurate and precise results by considering browser type, connection speed, and more.
With its crystal-clear testing, you can also visually compare two web pages.
From the number of speed tests you want to carry on and get a repeat view of the web pages to record the video of the website loading progress, the advanced features of the Webpage test tool help you stay ahead of your competitors.

3. Google Pagespeed Insight

You can find how your website is performing on desktop and mobile devices both with the help of Google page speed insight. This tool lets you get access to the lab and field data of a webpage.
While a score of 90 shows that your website is performing well, a score ranging between 50-90 depicts that your website needs improvement. Also, a score of below 50 is considered poor and requires immediate correction.
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4. Pingdom

It is an easy-to-use speed test tool that can be used seamlessly by novices and experts. It monitors your website round the clock from more than 70 global locations and provides a high end-user experience by analyzing your website's uptime, performance as well as interactions.
Pingdom also has features of the film strip and timeline metrics where you can get screenshots of the elements present on your website for every 500ms for the exact time it took for the entire page to load.

5. Dareboost

You can easily analyze and optimize your website's speed through Dareboost. Here's a look at various features it provides:

Website Performance Monitoring

From detailed records of your website's performance to going to the root cause of website slowdown, Dareboost lets you regularly monitor your website's performance. Further, it gives you an insight and alerts you about the quality drop of your website.

Comparative Website Speed Analysis of Two Web Pages.

You can get a competitive edge over your competitors by comparing your website with theirs. Dareboost comes with features of interactive comparison charts and video replay of the website's comparative analysis.
The comparison gives you a precise idea about your competitor's strengths and weaknesses, thereby helping you improve and rectify your website performance.

6. Site 24*7

With Site 24*7, you can analyze your website speed through a real browser. You can also record the load time for various website elements such as images, videos, JavaScript and identify those causing your website to slow down.
Further, you can also keep track of components such as connection time, time to the first byte, last byte time and identify the stages at which these components lead to slow loading of your website.
All in all, this tool works seamlessly in finding out errors. It also works towards helping you accelerate your website's speed with features like PageSpeed score and PageSpeed suggestions.

Wrap Up

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Faster page loading positively influences your website by improving user experience, decreasing bounce rate, and improving conversion rates. All these factors readily contribute to the proper optimization and improved SEO of your website.
With the help of the tips mentioned above and tricks, you can easily find out the issues that are slowing down your website and take the necessary steps to correct them.