How Does Website Speed Tie Into SEO?
By Technology Desk
Thursday, September 24, 2020.
Website structure, content, backlinks, and a huge array of other factors influence your website’s position on search engines like Google. Site owners have to work extremely hard to get themselves into the top spots, and it often takes a lot of time to achieve the results they want, with constant competition making the whole thing much harder. Of course, though, there are some areas that many webmasters seem to ignore. Website speed is one of these, with this aspect of your site having a dramatic impact on your SEO. But how exactly do website speed and SEO work together? Let’s find out.
Mobile Indexing
Google is the top dog when it comes to search engines, and this giant has long been using mobile indexing as its primary ranking factor. If a website loads slowly, this problem will be even worse on mobile devices, with most people’s phones struggling to load webpages on even the fastest of connections. This makes it crucial that your website runs quickly on devices like these. Tools like Google PageSpeed can give you a good idea of how well your pages perform on mobile devices, giving you hints and tips that could help you to make improvements that will speed up your website.
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User Retention
It can be hard to keep a user’s attention, and Google knows this. If a website takes more than a second or two to load, most users will simply go back and move to the next result. This isn’t good for Google, and this means that slower sites won’t be given the same attention as those that are able to provide users with what they want in good time. Google Search Console can give you an idea of how well your website is performing when it comes to user retention, making it nice and easy to see where improvements could be made that will make it easier to get people to visit your website.
Improving Site Speed
Improving website speed can be a long process, often involving a little bit of trial and error. Caching should be used, along with file minification, image compression, and lazy-loading, and you can also use a CDN to make the website feel snappier. Of course, though, this won’t sound like an easy job to most people, and this is where some support will come in. A good SEO Agency will be able to help you to improve your website loading speeds, providing you with everything you need to get into better rankings. A small increase in speed can make a big difference to your performance on sites like Google.
With all of this in mind, you should be feeling ready to get started on improving your website speed to improve your SEO. This process can be long, but it will always be worth it to improve the speed of your website.
