Editorial Staff
Your website loading speed is one of the factors of how you can get a good ranking on SERP.
The slower your website load, the more potential audience will turn away.
In addition to bounce rate, a slow website can have a serious impact on the search engine’s crawl budget.
What is Website Speed?
Website speed is the amount of time that it takes for a website to load.
It determine by several factors such as site’s server, image compression, and page file size.
The heavier your page’s size and the slower your network hosting, the slower your page will load.
However, the website speed is not as simple as it look.
Take a look on below different ways on measuring a website speed!
You can check your website speed here.
Website Speed Measurement
There are three ways to measure a website speed:
- Fully Loaded Page
- Time to First Byte
- First Meaningful Paint/First Contextual Paint
Let’s go into depth each one of them!
Fully Loaded Page
Fully loaded page is the time measurement on how long it takes for 100% of the resources on a page to load.
This is the simplest way to measure how fast a page load.
Time to First Byte
Time to first byte or TTFB measure how long it takes for a website to start the first loading process.
Have you ever landed on a website page that started a white blank screen for a second before it started to load the content piece by piece?
The amount of time that the website stays white blank screen before showing any single piece of content is what we called as TTFB.
First Meaningful Paint/First Contextual Paint
First contextual paint measure how long it takes for a website to load enough of the resources for an audience to be able to read the content.
After a website started it first loading process, it won’t show all piece of the content right away.
Instead, it normally start showing piece by piece until it load fully.
The user does not need to wait until the whole piece of content to be loaded before they started reading your content.
Instead, they will start reading the moment there is enough content showed in their screen, although it only a portion of a full loaded content.
This is what we mean by the first contextual paint measurement.
Which Measurement is The Best?
Google has not announced any official statement on whether they’re looking on fully loaded page, TTFB or first contextual paint.
Therefore, it is important to focus on improving all the website speed metrics that you can optimize.
Why Website Speed is Important in SEO?
1. Ranking Factor
Google has stated that website speed as a ranking factor in SERP since 2010.
Since then, Google keep increasing the level of website speed importance.
So, if your site has a slow website speed, it can damage your ranking performance significantly.
2. User Experience
Google prioritize user experience more than anything.
If your website speed is slow, chance is your audience will leave your site and bounce back.
Remember what does a high bounce rate means? Lower ranking in SERP.
3. Limiting Search Engine’s Crawl Budget
Improving the website speed can result to Googlebot crawling more of your site’s page.
A slow loading website will consume valuable Googlebot time to crawl your site.
“Making a site faster improves the users’ experience while also increasing crawl rate.” Google
What is a Good Website Speed?
Google recommend every webmaster to optimize their website speed under two seconds.
According to the our research, if it is takes more than 3 seconds for a website to load, half portion of the visitors will bounce back.
Meanwhile if your site loading more than 4 seconds, you can say good bye to 80% of your audience.
Therefore, here’s how to improve your website speed!
How to Improve Website Speed?
1. Compress Images
One of the factor of website speed is the page size.
Therefore, your goal is to reduce as much as page size as possible, but still delivering the same quality of your content.
Usually, images take up to 50% to 90% of a website page size.
If you run a WordPress site, you can try plugin like WP Smush.
With this plugin, you can automatically compress multiple images in bulk that you have uploaded to the library.
If you’re not a WordPress user, you can try Mass Image Compressor.
2. Compress Code
Image is not the only thing that you can compress to smaller the file size of your page.
In fact, you also can minify the resources like:
- HTML
- CSS
- Javascript
Clean up any unnecessary and bloated code that you can find in your page.
For example, after you deactivate a plugin, the code will exist in your page although the feature has been deactivated.
The cleaner your code, the faster your site will load.
You can also use program like Gzip to help you compress the code.
3. Activate Browser Caching
Browser caching allow your audience to store part of your website in their browser cache.
Meaning to say, the next time they visit your site, it will load much faster.
However, browser caching will not affect any first-time user or those audience that frequently cleared their browser cache.
You can either set up your browsing caching in your .htaccess file or with a WordPress plugin.
4. Hosting
When you’re using the basic plan hosting of any hosting company, normally you’ll share a server with millions of other website.
However, when it comes to hosting, you’ll get what you paid for.
When you upgrade your account to premium hosting or dedicated server, your server will load faster.
5. Content Delivery Network
Content delivery network or CDN work by figuring out where your audience is physically located and then serving up the site resources based on the nearest server to them.
This way, the data will load faster since the file location is using the near server.
Ready Set? Go!
Optimizing website speed is one way to outplay your competitor.
Imagine this way, your competitor has much bigger authority than your site and better content than yours. However, their loading speed is too slow.
This way, you can have a chance to have lower bounce rate that might boost your ranking sooner.
