Website Speed

Why Page Loading Time Is Important for SEO

Page Load time Is a Primary Ranking Factor. Your website needs to be fast enough for your visitors. By monitoring your bounce rate (in Google Analytics or comparable metric trackers) and page load time (using the Chrome extension “Page Load Time” or more extensive trackers) you can continue to enhance your website and better serve your visitors.

Google has indicated that site speed (and as a result, page speed) is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. And research has shown that Google might be specifically measuring time to first byte as when it considers page speed. A slow page speed means that search engines can crawl fewer pages using their allocated crawl budget, and this could negatively affect your indexation.

Page speed is also important to user experience. Pages with a longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page. Longer load times have also been shown to negatively affect conversions.

The standards many have been using for page load time come from a study conducted by Geoff Kenyon where he compares website speed against the rest of the web:

• if your site loads in 5 seconds, it is faster than approximately 25% of the web
• if your site loads in 2.9 seconds, it is faster than approximately 50% of the web
• if your site loads in 1.7 seconds, it is faster than approximately 75% of the web
• if your site loads in 0.8 seconds, it is faster than approximately 94% of the web

At Google, they aim for under a half-second.” Half a second is fast, to put it in layman terms it’s close to blinking, while two seconds is shorter than one breath — and that PageSpeed time is what they thought websites 6 years ago should be aiming for. Serve your customers with the page load time they need, a good goal being 1-2 seconds.

Page speed metrics

• Time to First Byte (TTFT) – The time it takes for the browser to get the first byte of content from the server, i.e., how long does it take for a page to begin loading?
• Page Load Time – It’s simple: how long does it take for all of your page’s resources to load.
• First Paint (FP) – The first pixel to appear in the user’s browser. This can be a background color or a header image. Improving your FP won’t help you much because the user is still expecting something meaningful to be displayed.
• First Contentful Paint (FCP) – The amount of time it takes the browser to render the first pieces of content, such as text or an image.
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – focuses on the most meaningful content relevant to the user. LCP is one of the parts of the new metrics of Core Web Vitals. It measures how long it takes for your site’s main content to load. The LCP element is typically your site’s hero section, featured image, or a large text paragraph.
• First Input Delay (FID) – FID is a real-user web performance metric that measures a web page’s interactivity and responsiveness. It counts the time between when a user first interacts with your site and when the browser reacts and begins processing that interaction.
• Time to Interactive (TTI) – TTI measures the time it takes for a page to become fully interactive. In contrast, FID measures user interactions that happen before the page is fully interactive.

Some ways to increase your page speed

Enable compression

Use Gzip, a software application for file compression, to reduce the size of your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files that are larger than 150 bytes. 

Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML

By optimizing your code (including removing spaces, commas, and other unnecessary characters), you can dramatically increase your page speed. Also remove code comments, formatting, and unused code. Google recommends using CSSNano and UglifyJS.

Reduce redirects

Each time a page redirects to another page, your visitor faces additional time waiting for the HTTP request-response cycle to complete. For example, if your mobile redirect pattern looks like this:

example.com -> www.example.com -> m.example.com -> m.example.com/home

…each of those two additional redirects makes your page load slower.

Remove render-blocking JavaScript

Browsers have to build a DOM tree by parsing HTML before they can render a page. If your browser encounters a script during this process, it has to stop and execute it before it can continue.

Google suggests avoiding and minimizing the use of blocking JavaScript.

Leverage browser caching

Browsers cache a lot of information (stylesheets, images, JavaScript files, and more) so that when a visitor comes back to your site, the browser doesn’t have to reload the entire page.

Improve server response time

Your server response time is affected by the amount of traffic you receive, the resources each page uses, the software your server uses, and the hosting solution you use. To improve your server response time, look for performance bottlenecks like slow database queries, slow routing, or a lack of adequate memory and fix them. The optimal server response time is under 200ms.

Use a content distribution network

Content distribution networks (CDNs), also called content delivery networks, are networks of servers that are used to distribute the load of delivering content. Essentially, copies of your site are stored at multiple, geographically diverse data centers so that users have faster and more reliable access to your site.

Optimize images

Be sure that your images are no larger than they need to be, that they are in the right file format (PNGs are generally better for graphics with fewer than 16 colors while JPEGs are generally better for photographs) and that they are compressed for the web.

Use CSS sprites to create a template for images that you use frequently on your site like buttons and icons. CSS sprites combine your images into one large image that loads all at once (which means fewer HTTP requests) and then display only the sections that you want to show. This means that you are saving load time by not making users wait for multiple images to load.

The Best Site Speed Measurement Tools

Speed tests may vary based on the location of the test, environmental influences (like the time of day), and other factors. This is just one reason why speed tools do not always provide the same results. Different tools may measure speed differently, and may even use completely different metrics.

That’s why we recommend using all of these tools when testing a site (and do not rely on just one):

• Pingdom Website Speedtest Tools
• GTMetrix
• WebPageTest
• Google Lighthouse for Chrome, or, Google PageSpeed Insights
• Chrome / Firefox’s ‘network’ information

Each of these tools has a slightly different approach when it comes to measurement, reporting, and making suggestions for improvements. To get the most out of them, you’ll need a good understanding of the different metrics they measure, and to understand how best to interpret the results.