It’s a brand new year! It’s time to evaluate where we are in our lives and in our businesses and set some goals on what we want to accomplish in 2020. Something that should definitely be on our website’s to-do list is to improve page speed. This is a critical piece of the SEO puzzle that should be revisited often to make sure your site is on track. Read on to learn some of the top strategies in 2020 for optimizing your site’s load time.

What is page speed?

Page speed is the time it takes for a given page on your website to load. It plays a large part in the overall “site speed” that Google takes into account when evaluating your site. Site speed is an average of several page’s load time, so improving a page’s load time is improving your site speed.

Why is page speed important to SEO?

Page speed is important for two main reasons: Appeasing Google and providing a good user experience.

Google values speed when ranking sites

Google has made it known that site speed is a factor used by its algorithm to rank pages. Site speed is directly influenced by page speed, so this becomes critically important.
 
Google has also shifted to mobile first indexing, which means that your site is first evaluated based on how it performs on a mobile device. So things that can drastically slow down a page: image size and weight, page code, redirects, and server response times become even more important as mobile devices typically exacerbate these issues.
 
Also, Google allots a finite amount of time to crawl a site. This is commonly referred to as “crawl budget.” If a page takes too long to load, the crawl budget will be exhausted and Google will not have the time to crawl very many pages. This has the potential to negatively impact the indexing of your site.

Users value speed when interacting with sites

When it comes to getting conversions, be they form fills, purchases, or other site interactions, user experience is everything. Similar to Google, users have a certain amount of time or patience they’ll wait for a page to load. It the page is slow, the user will likely not stick around very long and exit the site. That means that longer load times can negatively affect user engagement and conversions.
 
Think about the frustration that builds when you wait for a page to load on your computer or mobile device. It can be maddening! Is that the type of user experience we want? I don’t think so!
 

What are some methods to improve page speed?

Fortunately, there are some tried and true methods to improve page speed. There are numerous ways and the list is ever evolving but I’ll cover some of the basics here:

Image Size and Weight Compression

Images are critical pieces of websites. Without images, a page becomes a wall of words that is not only daunting but also uninteresting. Users are far less likely to read through a page completely devoid of images.
 
That said, images have the propensity to drastically impact page speed! Reducing the “weight” of images using software designed to compress them can dramatically improve load time. This can be done while still maintaining high resolution and image quality.

Optimizing On-Page Code

This is definitely something you’ll want to enlist an accomplished developer to take care of. (like those who work at Ecreativeworks!) There are different redundancies and pieces of coding that can be optimized such as removing unnecessary spaces and other characters. By minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML you can improve page load time.

Strategically and Judiciously Using Redirects

A redirect is when a page is set to automatically point to a different page. Sometimes this is used while one page is being worked on, and other times it’s used as part of the link structure and organization. However they’re used, they increase the waiting time for a page to load. While you don’t have to wait for the entire page to load before it’s redirected, there still is an amount of time needed for the instruction to redirect to be read and for the new page to begin loading.
 
This may seem like a small amount of time, but any increase to load time can negatively affect user experience and how Google crawls your site.

Using a Content Distribution Network to Improve Site Speed

Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) or content delivery networks are a great way to cut down on page load time! They house your site’s information in a network of servers around the country or world, cutting down the time it takes for your site to load.

How does a Content Delivery Network work?

A CDN is a network of remote servers around the world that cache and store your site’s content. These remote servers are called “points of presence,” or POPs. When a visitor arrives at your site, information is served from the nearest POP rather than your business’ origin server. This cuts down the distance the request has to travel, thereby cutting down the time it takes for the page to load.
 
 Typically, a website is housed in your business’ server which is called the origin server. When a user wants to view your site, that request is sent from their server to yours. The page information is then sent back from your server to theirs, renders on their machine, and voila! The user can see your website.
 
This system works great for local traffic! But what if I’m located in St. Paul, Minnesota and my potential visitor is in Izumo, Japan? Not only a long ways away, but a rather small town which likely has slower internet speeds.
 
In the structure outlined above, the visitor’s request would have to travel all the way from Izumo to St. Paul and then back again. They might be waiting a bit for that page to load. But with a CDN, the nearest POP would receive the request and be able to respond faster than it having to travel all the way around the world.

How do CDNs help SEO?

Content Delivery Networks help to improve one of the most important aspects of SEO: page speed. Because the assets for your site are cached geographically closer to the user, a CDN decreases site latency. This increase in speed not only factors into your site ranking but also user experience. Decreasing load time has been shown to increase site engagement and conversions.
 
Here are some other SEO advantages to using a CDN:
 

• Images are indexed faster. Hosting images on a CDN allows Google to index them faster and more often. This is important because more and more image search traffic is factoring into overall site traffic.
• Images are also more easily compressed by using a CDN, thus increasing page speed.
•  A CDN also spreads the volume of traffic out to POPs so your origin server is less likely to be bogged down. This bogging can impact page load time or even bring down the entire site.
• CDNs will also regularly update the POPs content by purging and recaching site assets to make sure the most up to date version of the site is stored.

 
A Content Delivery Network is not the silver bullet for page speed and SEO. Regular maintenance and optimization will still be required on the front and back ends of the site to make sure it stays up to speed with Google’s and user’s expectations. That said, a CDN is a potentially valuable tool in helping to accomplish these ends and should be considered for your SEO strategy.

Ecreativeworks is here to help

We have a dedicated staff of digital marketing specialists, copywriters, and developers who are well-versed in Content Delivery Networks and how they can effectively fit into a larger digital strategy. If you have any more questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out and we’ll be happy to help!