Google Page Speed Guide

When it comes to your website, page speed has a huge influence not only on search engine optimisation ranking but also user experience. When your pages load fast, search engines understand that they are optimised for performance. Therefore, understanding page speed importance and impact on SEO can help you to improve your rankings. In this short guide we will look at how the speed of your page impacts SEO and what you can do to improve it.

What is page speed?

Before we go any further, it’s important to understand page speed. Put simply, it is the speed at which a browser fully loads a page and its contents so that a user can use it. This is measured via various metrics and is not necessarily what a human perceives as a fast-loading page. Sometimes a page can appear to load quickly on a good internet connection but is poorly structured and won’t load quickly on a slow internet connection. In such cases this page will have a poor performance score.

In terms of SEO, page speed is a direct ranking factor so will impact rankings and traffic to your website.

When a request is made for a page in a browser, it loads everything, including code, images and any other necessary files by default. So if your site does not defer elements in that initial loading then it’s likely to be extremely slow.  Slow pages can make it harder for search engines to find and understand your site, reducing your visibility in online search. Improving your site’s performance will help with this and result in more frequent indexing by Google. Many people use their mobiles as their go-to devices for information, so you must consider optimising your websites and pages for both mobile devices and desktop computers.

How important is your page speed for SEO?

The simple answer is that it is critical for both SEO and users. With the increase in internet speeds and processing power for mobile devices and computers over the years, users’ expectations have also increased. They want information, and they want it fast. Users are more likely to have a positive experience if your website loads quickly. If it loads slowly, however, they may leave before even seeing what you have to offer.

User experience should be your top priority when optimising for page speed. User experience and SEO are now fully inter-twined so that what is good for one is good for the other. Keeping people happy also keeps Google happy! When you focus on delivering faster pages, you may find that many of your other issues resolve themselves.

Checking the performance of your page

There are several ways in which page speed performance influences SEO:

• User experience
• Ranking positions
• Crawl efficiency
• Conversion rates

Fortunately, there are plenty of tools that you can use to help you check the speed of your page. Google’s own page speed insights tool is among the most popular tools. However, there are also third-party tools that you may want to consider using as well. Let’s look briefly at two of Google’s free tools:

Google PageSpeed Insights

This free tool offers detailed insights about the performance of your site on both mobile and desktop, gives recommendations for improving page speed optimisation. The tool is designed by Google so should be considered before any other.

Google Search Console

This free tool offers detailed reports on the performance of your website, including core web vitals and mobile usability issues. Under the settings section of the Google Search Console, you will see a crawl report where you will find some vital signals.

The importance of understanding your page speed measurements

When it comes to both SEO rankings and user experience, page speed is critical, so it is necessary to understand how they are measured. There are several metrics that are used to assess response time of a web page and how usable this makes it to visitors. They offer insights into different aspects of your pages, their loading and also their interactivity. This helps you to identify any areas that may need improvement.

When you monitor these key indicators, you are making sure that your website is performing efficiently and ensuring that it achieves better search engine rankings and engagement. Here are some of those essential page speed metrics you need to be looking at – all can be viewed in the PageSpeed Insights output for any given page:

• Time to First Byte (TTFB)
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• First Contentful Paint (FCP)
• Time to Interactive (TTI)
• Fully Load time
• First Input Delay (FID)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
• Total Blocking Time (TBT)
• Speed Index (SI)
• Resource Load Time
• Onload Time
• DOM Content Loaded (DCL) Time
• Requests Per Second

When you track and optimise all of these metrics you can really improve the speed of your page. This will help to improve your ranking on the Search engine result pages (SERPs), and this will help you to improve customer satisfaction.

Factors affecting page speed and how to improve them

There are multiple factors that influence the loading speed of your pages. These are just some of them:

• Website design and theme – Design quality and theme are crucial in determining load time. Poorly optimised themes and complex designs make things slower, so don’t overcomplicate
• Image and video size – Videos and large image files make pages slow to load. Compress images and videos without compromising on quality to improve loading times.
• Fonts and document files – Any files you load regularly should be optimised. This means you should use a web-supported font or a standard library and minimise the size.
• Coding structure –  Duplicate or poorly structured code reduces load time. Opt for well-organised and clean practices to streamline your codebase and improve performance.
• Apps and plugins – Excessive use of plugins can increase website loading time. You should regularly review and optimise the use of plugins to ensure your website is still fast-loading. For WordPress websites there is a useful plugin that cleans up excessive code from other plug=ins (somewhat ironic!). See our guide to why you might want to use the Asset Cleanup plugin.

There are plenty of things that you can do to optimise the speed of your pages and improve your SERP rankings at the same time. There are also some great tools that you can use to help you do this. Checking regularly will ensure that you keep on top of your website performance so it’s always working at the best speed possible.