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Friday, August 7, 2015

Website Speed Affects Rankings


Website speed is key to user experience, so if your site is slow, there is no reason to keep it that way. What's the use of getting traffic from search engines, when your visitors have to hang for 10+ seconds before they can see your content – they will have left much before the page has loaded. 
 If you want to improve website speed, there are a couple of steps to be taken. First, you need to measure your website speed – otherwise how do you know it's slow?  
In order to measure load times, you need a good tool. The choice here is quite rich. Pingdom Page Load Time tool and Google Analytics Site Speed reports give a good idea of your site's general performance. WebPageTest is a more advanced tool because it allows to test your site in different browsers and spot slow areas on your site. 
 One of the obvious reasons a site is slow is that the server you are hosting it on is slow. The reasons here could be numerous – from a web hosting provider that lacks the capacity to offer fast servers, to the type of your hosting account. 
Your server might be fast but if your site itself is slow, you will still experience speed issues. If your code and images are not optimized for fast loading, you won't see speed improvements till you fix them. This task could take a very, very long time, especially if your code and images are bloated but you've got to do it. For images, you can use compression and/or smaller sizes. This will speed loading big time. For HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and other Web languages there are tons of tricks (and tools) how to optimize your code. 
The bigger problem with slow sites is that they are not user–friendly, which in turn kills conversions. If you don't want to lose money because of the speed issues of your site, take the time to fix them – it will pay in the long run. 
 

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