Analyze Page Load Time for SEO Success
Writing by Brick Marketing in SEO
Like any service provider, the search engines want to provide a service that will keep customers happy. This means that they want to rank the best possible pages that are relevant to keyword search terms. If the websites that the search engines suggest to users aren’t relevant or are poorly developed, search engine users will have a bad experience and seek alternative searching options. Obviously, the search engines can’t let this happen and have created complex algorithms that determine what sites are “worthy” of a high ranking. Numerous factors make up the search engine algorithm, one of which is page load time. People are impatient and want immediate answers when searching for information. If your website loads slowly, visitors won’t wait around and the search engines take note.
If you are looking for information on your page load time, here are a few tools to check out:
Google PageSpeed Online – This tool provides you with information straight from the horse’s mouth. Google is by far the most popular search engine, so it’s important to know how it views your site. PageSpeed provides you with an overall page speed score out of 100 and a summary of suggestions for improvement ranked by priority. Desktop and mobile reports can be generated.
Pingdom – This tool tells you what your load time is, gives you a grade, and compares your website speed to others. For example: “your website is faster than 85% of all tested websites”.
Not pleased with your score/results? Here are some things to consider:
Revising Pages
Do you have pages that are loading slowly because there is simply too much on the page? If so, consider splitting content heavy pages into two or more pages. This will help from a usability perspective too, since the content on each page will be more focused.
Whether Graphics and Images are Necessary
Images and multimedia files can “spice up” your website and make it attractive but are also the biggest culprits of slowing a website down. Think about whether pictures and other media are really necessary and add value to the page. Consider removing extraneous photos, videos, or pop up ads that aren’t needed or reduce the size to speed up the rendering process.
Website Code
A poorly coded website with too much HTML information on the page can slow it down. Remove any coding that isn’t needed and try putting CSS and JavaScript information into a separate file and referencing that file on the page to increase page load speed.
