What is Page Speed?

Web speed is the time it takes for a website to view all content on a page, also known as page loading time. What also impacts the speed of the website is the duration of the first byte, which is how long it takes for the browser to obtain the first byte of data from the web server.

The pace of the page depends on many factors, and the majority can be programmed for improved website results.

Solutions To Reduce Page Speed

Use a CDN: It is strongly recommended to use the Content Distribution Network to speed up website loading. It entails seeing your details all over the place, ready to be shown in every region. It reduces the time the server takes to transmit the data to the remote browser. As the name suggests, it is a network of servers that hosts the static files for quicker distribution. 

Minify Markup, CSS, JS: These are the previously described “static files” that contain all the information on your page-content, formatting and relations. When Google recommends that you minify a file, it means removing all useless material, such as comments within the text, extra lines or gaps, etc. Using fewer lines of code to decipher would make the spider crawl the web even quicker.

Browser Caching: Browsers can store files to make pages load easier when users access them again.

Optimize Images: We need to compact images to the shortest possible scale. Initial photographs do not weigh more than 70kb and 10kb for thumbnails. Look at how much your pictures weigh and you’ll be surprised to see how much speed you can increase only by reducing their bulk!

Enable Gzip: This is just as critical as minimizing data. If you have ensured that all of the above are minimized to a minimal, the next move is to gzip the files: compact them.

Improve First Time Byte: This word has also been adopted. We want to reduce the time it takes for the browser to receive the first byte of information from the server by optimizing the backend code or by purchasing faster servers.

Is Page Speed a Google Ranking Factor?

Use a CDN:
One of the search engine functions is to recreate user behaviour and decide whether or not a website is important, look at user interface, content quality, etc. It’s very clear, then, that if a visitor gets irritated waiting for a page to load, the Google bot would also regard the page as non-user friendly.

The page loading speed is therefore an important page ranking factor and it is crucial to minimize it for two reasons: 

If the website has a long loading time, the Google spider that crawls the web page may take so much time to visit the entire site and eventually exit it before indexing all the pages that impact the ranking.

A slow website raises the bounce rate, since a visitor doesn’t want to wait for the page to load and leave.

How Does Page Speed Impact your SEO?

Use a CDN:
As users are less likely to remain on a page that takes too long to launch, Google will penalize them for being too late to assign a bad location to the search results. That’s why we say page speed is also a ranking factor. 

It’s also shown that a speedy website helps push further conversions because it doesn’t make people wait too long for an order or an online transaction. As we have said, there are so many choices on the Internet that if a page is too sluggish, people can only move to another website that promises faster speed and, eventually, better experience.

How to Test your Page Speed?

Let’s look at some tools to verify the pace of your page: 

Pagespeed Insights: This tool was developed by Google Developers to find key problems that bog down the loading time of a website and help developers repair them quickly. The inputs are rather actionable, since they propose improvements in depth when listing the affected sites. 

Webpagetest.org: This one allows you to be more accurate about your questions when there are different criteria. For eg, you can choose a country (or even state if you have visitors from the US) and choose a computer (because it can process data at different speeds). 

GTMetrix: Last but not least, this application provides several tools to measure the pace of the website and learn about its results. The data is displayed in a very visual manner and can be tracked.
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