An introduction to what Page Speed is and why it is important

Page speed isn’t the same as “site speed.”

Page Speed is the time it takes to fully load and display the entire content on a particular site page on a web browser. It can also be described as the time it takes your browser to the first byte (receive the first byte of information) of the data from the webserver.

Luckily, there are several online tools by which you can evaluate the metrics of your site, including Google’s Pagespeed Insights, WebPage Test, GTmetrix, and Pingdom. Let’s talk about them.

Page Speed Insights

 Google’s Pagespeed Insights tops our list. Currently hosted as part of Google Developers, it combines data from CrUX (Chrome User Experience Report) and reports on two crucial speed analysis.

The tool provides a detailed metric of how fast your site loads. Also, you’ll also have access to a comprehensive strategy of how to improve it.

Pingdom

Pingdom Page Speed is another great tool that provides a detailed insight into how to improve your website. Like Google’s tool, it also gives a step-by-step analysis of how you can fix and improve the overall health of your site.

Why Is Page Speed Important for Google Rankings?

Page speed is as essential to user experience as it is to Google. Pages that take almost forever to load up will have higher bounce rates and simultaneously, lower average time on page.

According to 2018 research by Google, 53% of mobile users leave a site that takes longer than three seconds to load. (https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/data-measurement/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/)

Slow page speed has also been reported to mean a lesser chance of search engines crawling the pages of your site. And as a result, a lesser conversion rate and indexation.

Here’s how you can speed up your site loading time:

Optimize Your Images. Pay attention to your images. Make sure they are not larger than they need to be and are compressed for the web.

While you may already be displaying images on your website at a reduced size than the actual sizes, it may not yet be perfect. Use free online image optimization tools such as Tiny PNG to rescale your images and reduce load time.

Also, you can save the image (convert) with another file format, thereby reducing their sizes. If you currently have .jpeg images, for instance, you can just keep them instead as compressed .jpg files without losing much detail.

A great alternative is a tool like Compressor.io that lets you convert your image files without losing image quality. The tool is excellent for JPEG, PNG, GIF and SVG files.

Improve Your JavaScript and Cascading Stylesheets (CSS). This might not work great for you if you’re not technically minded. But if you know your way around it, improving your JavaScript and CSS documents is a good way of increasing page speed on your site.

Clear up Your Redirects. While this is a great tip on how to improve your page speed, using too many redirects can obstruct each other and become irrelevant. I recommend temporary 307 redirects and permanent 301 redirects.

Leverage browser caching. If you use a content management system like WordPress, you can install plugins, like WP Super Cache, that will cache the latest version of your pages. The plugins prevent the browser from dynamically generating every time a user wants to access it.

Use a Content Delivery Network. works great if you’re struggling with page loading time, especially if your site is already well known.

Mostly, it works by storing copies of your website at several locations and data centers. This is so that users have faster local access.

If you need any help or some pieces of advice, feel free to shoot us an email: info@techomatic@co.uk