When Google released Site Speed as a component of their analytics review, they mentioned that “While site speed is a new signal, it does not carry as much weight as the relevance of a page.” It is understood that a website’s speed will matter to the site visitors, but never be as significant as the relevant content displayed. If your site has a problem displaying content in a timely manner, search engines will not make up for what you lack. This means that you must be sure to have stable and proper quality Search Engine Optimization services. This makes your content ready to view and available for everyone (that includes crawlers).
Page Speed vs Site Speed – What Are the Differences?
Page Speed is simply defined by how long it takes for a page to load, or the first time it takes to “byte” for an individual page. Site Speed, on the other hand, is the speed measured over a large sample of page viewers. When you use this tool, something that takes longer than .05 seconds is seen as a “long task” and ranks it correspondingly. The usual average speed index for a mobile device is around 6 seconds. If you compare that to Google’s research, it is easy to see that they are well beyond what people see as “best-practice”.
What is the Number of Images and Resources on Your Site?
The feedback off of PSI assists you in figuring out all of the items that are loading behind the scenes, and all of this contributes to your site’s overall speed. It is almost unheard of for a website to have a perfect score.
It is extremely common for sites to be loading more assets than what is seen as best practice. Plugins have a lot to do with this issue, bringing a number of files that slow down the overall speed of your website.
Images can be optimized through exports available on certain online applications, but if the number of images on your site is higher than normal, you will receive slow speeds in return regardless. The tools job is to decide whether your images can be optimized any further regarding their size. If your images are already considered small, then they should run smoothly and quickly on a visitor’s device.
Try Using a CDN
A few of the resources might not be served closest to your user, but very often a CDN can help. It is important to mention however, that if your user is in a far east area such as Toronto, and your server is all the way in the USA west coast, this is not going to help serve fast content to the Toronto user. Every resource regardless of type that your site relies on, will end up slowing down the overall speed of your website’s performance.
If I Make My Site Faster, Will It Rank Higher?
This answer is difficult, because it is both a yes and no answer. It’s a fine idea, and actually highly recommended, to use the tools above in order to see how your site’s performance works. It is however, only a small part of your website’s ranking. If you want to truly figure out whether or not your site is working successfully at reaching the target audience you desire, you will need to fully grasp the knowledge that the metrics of your Analytics Data contains. You may ask yourself, “Why are visitors leaving my site? Is it because they can not find the content they are looking for, or is it because the website’s response time is low?” It may seem like a complicated issue, but there are many other types of off-site factors that will improve your overall ranking.
Look at Your Bounce Rate
In order to create and maintain a website that keeps visitors interested and engaged in looking at all of your content, you will need to have a low bounce rate. If a site includes very quick, small, to the point bits of information (ex. finding a phone number to call, a product description or price tag) your bounce rate will be high because the visitors will leave your site just as quickly as they entered it.
How We Can Help
If you are having a difficult time trying to bring the most relevant audiences to your website, our team at Cyrux Smart Solutions can help. We provide our clients with high quality Web Design in Newmarket and the GTA, as well as a number of other innovative marketing strategies that will help improve the ranking of your website exponentially. You can get a FREE quote by calling us at (416) 222-0035 today.