What is Page Speed?
Page speed is a crucial factor in SEO. Search engines such as Google have been giving importance to the user experience when ranking web pages and page speed has been a major contributing category in measuring user experience.
There are many ways to improve page speed and each way has its own metric. Page loading time, page size and web requests have been one of the more reliable metrics to monitor and improve in order to also improve web page speed.
Page loading time, page size and web requests
Page loading time is the amount of time it takes for a web page to load in a browser. Users want their web pages to load fast. In fact, a slow load time has been known to affect conversions and customer satisfaction. According to research, a one-second delay can reduce as much as 7% conversions and 16% customer satisfaction.
One way to reduce page loading time is to control and reduce your overall page size. Keep in mind that web assets such as videos and images can bloat your page size. You can opt to remove some unnecessary videos or images but you can also compress these files to reduce their size, especially if it is a crucial component of your website. Moreover, you can further reduce the page size by removing unused and unnecessary code and don’t forget to minify them on your public-facing website.
Another way to reduce page loading time is to reduce the number of web requests. When a user visits your website, their browser talks to your server by sending an HTTP request. When your server receives this request, it decides if it will grant the requested web content, and if it does, it will send them over to the browser. Each component of a webpage needs to be requested to the server and your browser will continue to send requests until all assets are rendered. This back-and-forth communication takes time and reducing the total amount of web requests can significantly decrease page load time.
By closely monitoring and improving all metrics mentioned above, your page speed and ranking will surely improve.
Further Reading:
Reduce HTTP Requests Like a Pro & Boost Your Site Speed – Titan Growth
3 Simple Tips to Improve You Website Page Loading Speed – Circle Studio
Webpage Size – Why is it important? And how do you optimize it? – SEOptimer
Nick Berns is a web developer & SEO specialist.
