How Important is Page Speed for SEO?
- Written by News Co
Page speed is a crucial factor when it comes to your website, in fact, it is so important that Google has made it a factor in how your site ranks. Google offers tools for developers and for webmasters to improve page speed. How do PageSpeed Tools from Google work and does the speed of your page affect your SEO?
PageSpeed Insights has not historically been a good tool. It was easy to find the information in that tool anywhere and using the tool did not indicate the speed of your page. Google has made changes and updates to the tool that have improved it significantly but that means that the tool is much harder to understand.
Mobile Site Versus Desktop Site
When you test a page’s speed, Google offers two separate scores, one for the desktop version and one for the mobile version. Google’s PageSpeed tool used to only measure the speed of the desktop site but since mobile usage has become more common Google now tends to test the mobile version first. With the PageSpeed Insights tool, a webmaster is provided a mobile speed which has been tested on a mobile connection. Many mobile users can only receive a 3G signal and even though the phone has a slower connection speed, the user still expects websites to load quickly. Sometimes the issue with the loading speed of a website is not about the site, it is about the connection speed of the WiFi. Desktop scores can be higher if a connection speed is higher with internet options such as light and fiber optics.
What is Page Speed?
Page speed relates to many factors including the performance of the website, the performance of the server, the web page that is being visited, the type of connection, the internet service provider, package and the processing power of the device as well as the browser being used. If someone is accessing a webpage on their smartphone, the speed of the page being loaded can be affected by the number of apps that are currently open on the phone.
Webmasters use Google PageSpeed Insights because it is a good tool. That was not necessarily true in the past but today’s version of this application gives plenty of information on the speed of a website loading. The tool lets you know all that there is to know about your page’s loading speed. If your page takes a long time to load it can affect rank, but the page must be completely usable once loaded to improve the score.
The speed of your page loading is measured in seconds and not points between 0 and 100. The tool PageSpeed will help you to improve the speed of your page but the score may not mean much in practical use. It is not clear whether Google measures the seconds it takes for your page to load or the core.
Google ranks your page by speed as follows: Time to interactive, speed index, first contentful paint, first CPU Idle, First Meaningful Paint and Estimate Estimated Input Latency. Speed scores are based on the algorithms of log normal distribution.
It is important to improve your site’s speed to improve your search rankings. The Google tool PageSpeed Insights helps by offering guides to best practices and improvements which are in priority of how they will impact the speed of your site. Although the score should not be something that you focus too much on, you should try to get yours over at least 50. The load time should be 3 seconds and very fast pages should load in 1 second.
A good server is useful because it compresses images and helps to keep everything simple so that your website speed improves. Smaller sites are okay on a shared server while larger business websites should host their sites on a custom server to ensure decent speed.
Page speed is important not only to Google, but to the visitors to your website. The reason is that most people do not want to sit around and wait for a page to load. If your website takes too much time to load, visitors are going to leave and go to another website that is faster and more efficient. If you want to have google and your visitors reward your site, make sure it loads quickly and use the tools that Google provides to measure speed and improve it.
