SEO in 2018: Why Page Speed Optimization (PSO) Should Be Your Focus
What’s the most important factor that every marketing campaign, business owner, and e-commerce store attempt to achieve? If you answered to increase sales by optimizing your conversions and reducing funnel exits, then you are on the right track. It’s 2018 and studies are still showing the incredible impact and correlation that poor page speed and load performance are a major contributing reason to why people back out.
It’s 2018; no one wants to wait anymore. We expect money transfers, messages, and everything else to be transparent and instantaneous, which is why you’d be better off focusing on making sure your page speed isn’t holding your marketing goals back.
Wonder Why Page Speed is Important? Well, if you appreciate profit like most of us, let’s look at what the big deal is with page load speed and if it’s worth focusing on in 2018.
Claiming Page Load Speed’s Importance
Before we begin, let’s set the scenario with a concentration on you. Think about when you first type your inquiry into Google, Baidu, or another engine. Once you hit enter and your results load up, you start to scroll. For most, we rarely look past the first few results and dare I say even to go as far to click on “Page 2” results. If you happen to be one of the lucky sites that make it to the top results where most clicking takes place, depending on your site’s speed and Google’s forthcoming 2018 update, your rankings just may be in jeopardy, resulting in several lost positions and a fight to regain them. This means Google is going to start considering Page Speed as a heavy ranking factor.
Back to our scenario.
You click on a few of the top choices that are the most relevant to your search. The first page loads in 5 seconds, the second one in 2, and the third in 7. According to several studies, the rate at which a page loads severely influences conversion rates of visitors. A page that takes longer than 2 seconds start to drive frustrations, abandonment, and other actions resulting in the loss of a potential client.
As technology continues to improve, we expect better and faster performance. When that is the case, it only makes sense to make sure our website’s speed it is keeping up.
Since this will be a major focus for 2018, it’s essential to know how to check page load speed to find out what needs to be done, if anything to keep your page running smoothly.
Is Your Page Load Speed Up to Par?
If you’ve made it this far, then you are probably multi-tabbing it to find out how to check page load speed for your site. No one likes hearing they could be losing sales because of how fast their page loads.
Good news! It’s not hard to test your page speed, and there are an insane amount of page testers out there, one of our favorites is GTMetrix, delivering detailed results that provides extensive speed reporting in several areas of your site, from file size to page speed, this lite tool is anything but lite.
The purpose of using this tool or a similar variant is to test the load performance and overall speed of your site. Some tools offer suggestions that can improve your page speed, reducing page load times. If you’ve run the test and found some points should be addressed, there are ways to address them and get those page speeds back up to where they need to be.
More recommended tools:
Pingdom
Google Pagespeed insight
Google Mobile Speed Test
DotCom Tools – Very cool (multiple locations)
Increase Your Page Speed Now: Here’s How
Your slow page is unattractive, and frankly, no one likes it. Your content is wonderful, design masterfully sophisticated and marketing strategy geared and optimized for maximum conversions, but nothing is happening, why? Did you check your page speed? Yep, if your page takes longer than 2 seconds you’re losing traffic, clicks, and ultimately money from impatient lost conversions that leave the funnel prematurely.
Do not be a slave to slow pages and lost traffic, do something about it by using these 4 proven speed-boosting techniques:
Meet GZip
Your professional, super HD resolution images and videos that are spread across your site do not have to be pulled down for smaller alternatives. GZip compression tool, compresses the file size without compromising the integrity of resolution quality for the exchange of faster page speeds.
Minify JavaScript and CSS
A common speed reducer that can bog down the performance of your website are your stylesheets loading or processing every time a user clicks through your site. Having your site Scripts and CSS data minimized by reducing extra drag, deleting additional white spacing, and cleaning up unnecessary coding, incredibly works to increase the page load rate. This can be done manually, but for an untrained expert, it is highly recommended to use a minify-type tool to assist with this step. Minified code does not harm the integrity of the code, but instead removes additional characters that are typically used for readability purposes, but do not have an impact on how the code operates. Essentially, to minify your code is to clean it up, reducing its size, and in some cases merges everything into two files, one for CSS and one for JavaScript when applicable.
Stay Calm and Keep your Cache On
Turning the cache settings for your pages that have heavy loading resources, will allow the site to refer to the cached version in times of slow loading performance in order to compensate and load the page to be viewed. Keeping your cached page versions updated will help keep the same fresh look of your updated pages when the normal pages are under-performing.
Bring AMP on Board for Mobile Users
If you haven’t done so yet, making the change to Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP for mobile display efficiency by redirecting your standard HTML coding to a liter version that has been stripped down of heavy coding that is not relevant to the mobile experience. Using AMP can drastically cut your load speeds up to 85%, turning your responsive and normal loading website into a speed-optimized monster, loading pages in fractions of a second instead of seconds.
Starting July Ranking Factors Concentrate on Page Speed Optimization for Mobile Users
In addition to making your online experience run as smoothly as possible across a magnitude of displaying devices, starting in July, there will be one more thing to include in your SEO plan if you want to rank in mobile search inquires. In January 2018, Google announced that in July it will start factoring mobile page speed as a ranking metric for some sites. This will mainly target sites that have very slow mobile pages that worsen user experience. While the above tips can help you improve your page speed, you wanna make sure your ranking is not actually affected by other factors.
Wanna hear more? Let’s talk marketing
