Site Speed and How It Affects Your Success

When you think of SEO, chances are good you immediately imagine keyword research and content creation. You probably think about backlinks from authority pages, as well as meta tags on your website pages. There are many moving parts that affect visibility and online success, but one that you might not pay much attention to is website speed. How does it affect SEO, visibility, and your overall visitor experience? Actually, site speed impacts SEO and overall success in a number of different ways.

Visitor Experience: One of the most important ways that site speed affects your success is in the experience you deliver to visitors. You’ve spent a great deal of time and effort designing a website that reflects your company’s brand, is rich in valuable content, and has an intuitive, easy to use structure. However, if your site is slow to load, none of that matters. Your visitors will leave after a few seconds because they simply do not have time to wait.

Google: Google themselves have stated that site speed is a critical factor. In fact, in mid-2018, the search engine giant released what they called “The Speed Update” which made loading speed a factor in SERP ranking for mobile searches.

Better Indexing: Site speed ensures that your website is indexed better by search engine spiders crawling it. Fast servers and an optimised site structure ensure that Google’s bots index your site more frequently and more accurately.

Lower Bounce Rate: Visitors who land on your website, only to leave very quickly are said to “bounce”. Bounce rates are reflected in your Google Analytics, and high rates reduce your site’s ranking. Faster load speeds lead to lower bounce rates. They also lead to increased conversions because your audience members stick around longer and actually see what it is you have to offer.

Given how important site speed is, you need to know how to optimise for it. There are quite a few important steps that you should take, from enabling compression to reducing the number of redirects, simplifying your site architecture, leveraging browser caching, limiting your use of JavaScript, and even using content distribution networks to more widely distribute the load of delivering content.

In the end, site speed is a critical factor for success no matter your industry or niche.