In the era of rapid IT development, information and time have become our most valuable resources. The time it takes to deliver information is a new measure of a source's value. It's no secret that poor performance hurts search rankings. Search engines like Google and Yandex favor fast sites.
Recent studies have shown that the key factor determining a website's position in search engines is the page load speed.
So why is this metric so important? Search engines focus on it for one simple reason: the more low-performing sites appear in the top results, the less competitive the search engine becomes. Users may not know the exact wait time, but in 99% of cases they won't return to a site that made them wait.
Let's start with the theory:
- Normal website load speed – 1 second or faster;
- Optimal website load speed – from 2 to 3 seconds;
- Low website load speed – more than 3 seconds.
Load speed for mobile users is also important. Since 2018 Google automatically moves slow-loading pages to the bottom of the search results. This change is called Speed Update.
Now let's move on to practice
First, you need to check how fast your pages load. There are several tools for this:
- PageSpeed Insights and other Google tools
- SynTraffic
- CloudFlare
- WebPageTest
- Pingdom
Google Lighthouse is used for mobile versions. This tool works with low network signal and in «offline» mode.
During the check, these tools will compare your metrics to ideal values using the following criteria:
- Quality of HTML, CSS and JS markup;
- Ping from different cities;
- Use of caching;
- Number of page-to-page navigations, etc.
One of the most popular SEO analysis tools is PageSpeed Insights. It measures mobile and desktop load speeds and gives recommendations to improve them. It also shows how fast the page loads for real users.
Let's look at this tool in more detail using the construction company website egemendikurylys.kz as an example.
From the web analytics report, we can immediately see what needs to be done to improve the site's performance:
However, chasing a 100/100 score isn't necessary. It won't help SEO, and users won't notice a real difference between 70/100 and 100/100. It's enough to set an optimal load speed so the site loads almost instantly and doesn't make users wait.
In conclusion, briefly, what does website speed optimization deliver?
- If your server response is very slow, it negatively affects your website's position in Google and Yandex. Browser tabs that sit idle for 3-5 seconds or more won't be appreciated even by soulless search bots.
- Crawl budget – the limit of pages search engines crawl during a given time period (for example, one day). The faster your pages are processed, the more pages search engines can crawl and index. This is most important for large online stores. Small sites don't need to worry about it.
