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Seconds matter when it comes to SEO & Web Design

October 01, 2021
Tom Maynard
Organic SEO Agency in UK - Web Choice

A website's loading speed is a significant important factor for ranking highly in search engine results. That means you need to do everything possible, such as optimising images and plugins, to aid performance, as well as removing any unnecessary code from your site that could slow download times so customers don't abandon you before they've seen what's on offer!

Ideally, a web user should be able to access the content of your pages within 2 seconds, without having their browser buffers fill up, or become laggy during interaction with elements on screen.

Page speed is not only important for users but also for Google. The faster your site is, the better chance that it will be crawled and ranked more highly by search engines such as Google, because they're looking to give people exactly what they want as quickly as possible!

Page speed is a crucial ranking factor for Google, so a slow-loading site will have fewer pages indexed, which means it may not be possible to rank at all. The faster your site is, the more pages will be indexed by Google, it’s as simple as that.

So, the answer is to simply be quicker right? It's not only about the loading speed of your website but also about how well it responds when users interact with it. You can check this by using Google PageSpeed Insights. But note that the displayed performance will differ depending on your computer and network connection.

The following are some points that can help you with your SEO and web design:

Optimise Images: Firstly, if you want to improve page load time, image size is one of the most important aspects to consider. There are many ways to optimise images before uploading them to your site; for example, you could use JPEG instead of PNG or GIF as they take up less space (in terms of kilobytes). You may also use image optimisation tools such as; TinyPNG , TinyJPG and Compressor.

In addition, WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless compression for images on the web.

Compressing Content -Of course, it is always better to reduce the file size of your site pages by minifying Javascript and CSS files. But if you do this, do make sure that these files are not already minified or compressed. This may be hard to establish as many developers upload their code in raw format for development purposes, and then after that, they minify them using services such as Minify. Remember also to delete unnecessary whitespace.

Improving Content Delivery Network (CDN) - Having a good CDN is perhaps one of the most effective ways to improve page speed. This is due to the fact that the service caches static resources in various servers around the globe. Using this content delivery network, you can deliver your static resources much faster to users as it reduces latency between two locations; the server hosting your site, and the user's location.

Improving Server Response Time - You should always use a fast web hosting service or dedicated server in order for your website to perform well in search engine results. A study by KISSmetrics reveals that 40% of people tend to abandon websites that take more than three seconds to load. So, if you want customers to not only visit, but also engage with your content, then you need a fast loading website.

Maximising Page Speed - There are a lot of things to consider for improving page speed, but even if you do all the previous measures listed, this won’t guarantee that your site will load as quickly as possible. It is always best to consider how well your server responds at different locations around the globe. Also, make sure that your plugins don't affect performance too much, and properly configure Google Analytics to reduce traffic delay where you can.

In addition, as you want people to interact with your content as much as possible, make sure that they have a good user experience. This means removing unnecessary distractions from the content area and making other elements on the page easily accessible so that people can see them without them having to scroll too much. All these elements together increase website engagement and drive up your CTR.

These are good starting points when it comes to speeding up the delivery of pages, but keep in mind too that you should continuously monitor the performance of your website in order to maintain high rankings with search engine results.

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