Are you looking to take your website to the next level but worried that your site speed is holding you back? Unsure whether poor site speed will even affect your SEO? In this article, we’ll dive into how site speed affects your SEO, what is considered a good site speed, how to measure it, and ways to improve it through AMP.
Key takeaways
Here’s a quick introduction to site speed and how to improve it:
- A site speed score of above 90 is considered “Good”, if you score below that, your site speed needs work.
- Site speed is an important ranking factor, as confirmed by Google.
- There isn’t one way to improve site speed and it requires multiple optimisations. We’ve listed our top 8.
- AMP strips your page down to the basics to provide an almost instant loading time for mobile users.
- AMP can be implemented manually by a developer, or by using a plugin such as AMP for WordPress.
What Is Site Speed?
Site speed refers to how fast a browser can load a page from your website. This includes the initial payload from when you click on a new site or page to when you see the content, not involving anything that happens once the page is loaded – see Site Performance.
Metrics that measure site speed include First Content Paintful, Largest Content Paintful, and Time To First Byte.
What is a Good Site Speed?
According to Google’s own documentation, a PageSpeed Insights score of 90 or above is considered good. If your site gets a score of between 50-89, this needs improvement, while below 50 is considered poor.
However, it also depends on specific metrics that are measured during the test, such as First Content Paintful and Largest Content Paintful – each of which has its own range for good, needs improvement, or poor scores.
[Screenshot from https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/v5/about]
What Is The Difference Between Site Speed & Site Performance?
While site speed and site performance are often used interchangeably, they are slightly different. Performance is actually an umbrella term that includes site speed, the page’s responsiveness once loaded, and how well the site performs from a technical standpoint.
For example, once a page loads, it can sometimes take a moment for the page to show the correct styles, which can cause the page to shift and jump once the style loads. This would fall under site performance since the initial loading of the page has already been completed.
It can also involve how well elements load as you move down the page, how fast popout menus load, and how JavaScript performs once triggered.
Does Site Speed Affect Google Ranking?
Absolutely. Site speed has been a confirmed Google ranking factor on desktop since way back in April 2010, with mobile rankings including site speed since July 2018. Essentially, the faster your site loads, the higher you’re likely to rank.
How Important is Site Speed For SEO?
Site speed is one of the more important aspects of SEO to get right. With a technically poor website, you’re unlikely to rank well on search engines. This is because user experience is one of Google’s key ranking factors and site speed will greatly affect this.
How To Increase Site Speed?
Optimising site speed isn’t a single task, unfortunately. You’ll need to check over a range of things on your site to see what areas could be slowing your site down and most of these require a lot of manual work.
Here are the top 8 areas to optimise your site speed with:
- Optimise Images – If used incorrectly, images can have massive file sizes that slow down your page’s load times. Ensure that all images are uploaded at the correct size for their use on the site and using an efficient format.
- Limit HTTP Requests – Your pages will often require multiple HTTP requests to load the page, including images, Javascript, and CSS files. Each request adds load time while the browser waits for a response from the server hosting the file, so the number of requests should be kept to a minimum. Bear in mind that your choice of page builder can have a huge impact on the number of HTTP requests a page requires.
- HTTP Caching – A developer can instruct the user’s browser to temporarily save certain elements of the page so that it’s loaded much faster on their next visit. This can greatly reduce loading times for your regular customers.
- Remove Unnecessary Code – Pages will often be instructed to load code that isn’t actually used on the page. Removing this extra code will reduce load times and could also reduce the number of HTTP requests required.
- Limit External Plugins & Scripts – Using a large number of external scripts and plugins can add to your load times – even when compared to achieving the same functionality manually. This is because external plugins will often include a lot of extra functionality and tasks that you aren’t using on your site.
- Remove Redirects – Some redirects are unavoidable, but they will always add time to the page load. Make sure to remove all possible redirects and go through all of your pages to make sure you haven’t internally linked to pages that have been redirected.
- Minify CSS & Javascript – Minifying code is the practice of removing any whitespace, comments, or unnecessary characters from your code. This essentially means that the browser will have less code to parse through, saving time. While the time savings here are marginal, it’s definitely worth doing. Just keep in mind that this can sometimes affect how your site looks or functions, so test your site in-depth afterwards.
What Are AMP Pages?
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is an HTML framework that strips your site down to basics to help it load faster on mobile. Initially created by Google, Bing and other search engines have begun to use AMP’s too.
Essentially, AMP restricts the HTML of a webpage and removes a lot of the extra design elements and attributes that slow down pages such as banners, images, and animations. This means that you’re left with the text content of the page with only the basic essentials so that the page loads almost instantly.
What Are The Negatives Of AMP Pages?
While AMP has benefits in terms of site speed and potential rankings, there are also certain negatives that should be considered.
Firstly, AMP strips down your page to the bare bones, meaning that it will essentially just be text. This can make for a very simple page that will load great but might have a negative impact on your conversion rates and the bottom line due to the lack of engaging content.
This means that you should only really use AMP if the design of the page is considered to be less important than the text content and speed of the page. This could be the case on blog pages for example.
How To Convert Normal Pages Into Accelerated Mobile Pages
To implement AMP into your site, you’ll need to add AMP HTML, Javascript, and cache. Doing this manually will require a developer to get right, but if you’re interested in learning more, you can read the AMP HTML Specification from Google.
Alternatively, you can often use plugins to complete these actions for you – depending on which CMS you’re using. Google, the AMP team, and Automattic (the founder of WordPress) contributed to an official AMP plugin for you to use to take over all of the heavy lifting for you.
This plugin is compatible with most other site speed-related plugins such as WP Rocket and setup is as simple as uploading the folder to your plugins, activating the plugin, and following the onboarding wizard to go through the guided setup.
Site Speed Optimisations To Improve Your SEO
With site speed being such an important factor for your overall SEO strategy, it’s important to get it right. At Wildcat Digital, our technical team are adept at completing technical optimisations of your site to ensure that pages load quickly and efficiently.
Get in touch with a member of our expert team to discuss your requirements and see what we can do for your site.
Jamie Stowe
Senior SEO Account Manager
