Website Speed Optimization: Why Is It Important in SEO?

You worked hard to get your website ready. It is up and running. And everything is good. Then the traffic starts coming in more and more every day. With this increased volume of traffic, your site performance begins to suffer as users start experiencing slower page loads or even errors that prevent them from accessing your content.

Website speed is a critical factor for the success of any eCommerce business. A slow-loading website is more likely to leave users frustrated and results in higher bounce rates. In this article, I will discuss the factors that contribute to the speed of a website and provide some suggestions on how you can optimize your website.

What is Website Speed Optimization?

Website speed optimization is the process of improving the performance of a website by reducing the time it takes to load. It includes various aspects like website design, website coding, and website content management. It also plays a major role in improving the user experience and is a key aspect of digital marketing as well as web development. A website that is slow or not performing optimally can cause visitors to bounce and they will not return. Optimizing your website will improve the conversion rate of your site and help you increase sales.

Why Should You Optimise Your Website Loading Speed? 

If you want to build a great site, then it is essential that your website loads fast. The ability to load quickly without the need for the user to wait is an important advantage that your site can have over other sites. Aside from that, here are the reasons why you should optimize your website loading speed.

Better Ranking

Core Web Vitals is a ranking factor in the Google search results and page speed is a big part of CWV. As part of search engine optimization, you should always make page speed optimization a priority when building your website. Search engines aim to provide the best user experience. Thus, search engines will prioritize showing websites with good site speed and Core Web Vitals higher up in the search results.

Lower Bounce Rate

Users don’t have the patience to wait for your site to load. If your website performance is terrible, they will exit yourself site before it even fully renders.

Boost Conversion Rate

Website speed is an essential factor that contributes to the success of your eCommerce business. 70% of buyers are willing to buy products from online retailers with fast-loading websites. Based on a Portent report, the first five seconds loading time has the highest conversion rates. And it drops by an average of 4.42% for every additional second delay in page loading time. If you have slow websites, it will reduce your business’s conversion rate and bring down the quality of your visitors’ experience. The slower your site speed, the more likely it is that your customers will leave without converting.

Why Does Website Speed Matter?

Website speed is really important to make your eCommerce business successful. A site that loads slowly can be frustrating for users and they may decide to move on to another website. Improving your page speed can have a positive impact on your SEO rankings. One of the factors that Google looks at when determining website rankings is the loading speed. The faster your website loads, the higher ranking you can get. On top of that, website speed matters because it helps you boost your conversion rate by increasing the number of visitors going to your website.

What is a Good Loading Speed?

Site speed is determined by how fast the browser can download and render all the images, CSS, JavaScript, and other assets. The more assets are downloaded and rendered, the longer it takes for the user to view a page. It is important to optimize your website because this will make your site more user-friendly.

For a website to be considered a fast-loading by Google, both for desktop and mobile devices, its page load time should be under half-second. But a site that loads no more than two seconds is still considered to be a good loading speed. If your website takes more than the recommended load time, then you are losing a lot of opportunities to rank higher, drive traffic, and earn more profi

Is My Website Fast?

Before you start any website optimization, you should first understand what your current website load time and user experience is so that you can perform any sitewide or web page improvements. You can do so, using 2 different tools.

Google Search Console

If you have claimed your website property on Google Search Console, you will be able to access the Core Web Vitals data. You can view both the mobile and desktop CWV data on which URLs require improvement. The CWV benchmarks for load speed are as follows:

• Good = Less than 2.5s on average
• Need Improvement = More than 2.5s but less than 4s on average
• Poor = More than 4s

URLs with issues are provided to you in groups with similar URL string which you can then expand and view the individual pages. These URLs can then easily be run through Google PageSpeed Insight to give you the real user experience as well as Google Lighthouse load time.

Google Analytics

While it does not really show you the loading speed of the pages, it does tell you your individual pages bounce rates and time on page, which can be an indicator of a slow loading page.

You can also use other website tracking tools such as Hubalz, which includes a page loading speed analysis tool and real user monitoring, making it easier to improve your website user experience.

Read also: Exabyte WordPress Hosting Review: Is It Worth It? 

How to Optimize Website Speed? 

Website speed is one of the most important factors in determining your online experience. A slow website can lead to a drop in revenue and brand damage. According to statistics , 64% of shoppers will look for other sites that are selling the same products if the first website they visit does not perform well. Also, 46% of users don’t visit websites with poor loading speed.

To avoid these statistics and make sure your site loads fast, here are some tips on how you can improve your website speed. I will be sharing tips mostly on how to improve your WordPress website’s loading speed, but some of these can be applied on other CMS or custom coded websites.

Web Hosting

Your webhost is the most foundational factor in website loading speed. Good webhost uses quality solutions such as SSDs instead of the standard hard drives and share your webhosting instance with less other users so that your site speed is less affected.

It is fine to get started on shared hosting but if you are running a heavy WooCommerce, community or LMS website, it is highly recommended to move to VPS hosting for more dedicated resources.

On my important WooCommerce sites, I use Contabo. Other important sites that do not require that much resource are hosted on Racknerd’s shared hosting while the rest of my passion projects are hosted on Starthost. I find that this allocation is the best value for performance in webhosting.

Caching

With caching, you will see the largest load speed improvement for your website. Certain web host provide server-side caching as part of the service, however, most of them do not. You will require plugins such as SWIS Performance, Swift Performance or Rabbit Loader for the job. Page caching converts your webpages into HTML files and stores them in the RAM of your server, which serves them much faster to first time site visitors.

Browser caching also does this, by saving a copy of your webpage on the website visitor’s browser, so that subsequent visits is rendered much quicker.

Other features in caching plugins that help to speed up your website include GZIP compression, compressing and make your styles and scripts load asynchronously. GZIP compression reduces the webpage size while async is the process that makes these styles and scripts load together rather than subsequently which increases the overall load time.

Optimize Images

Optimizing images is important in website speed optimization because this will have a positive impact on site load time. With a larger number of low-quality images, it will be more difficult for a browser to determine where the image files are going. Websites pictures should be optimized for the lowest file size possible and high quality.

In image optimization, the images are first compressed. The best image optimization tool I’ve tried and tested is the Shortpixel plugin. You can check out my video comparison with other popular image optimization plugins for WordPress websites. When using Shortpixel, you can expect an average reduction of image size by 40-50% with PNG files being reduced up to 90%.

After compression, you should then convert these images into WebP or AVIF formats. These are nexgen image file formats which are even smaller than the common JPG and PNG files while still retaining a high quality. WebP images are 26% smaller than PNGs while AVIF are provides an even smaller file size. However, certain web browsers such as Safari still do not support AVIF. Hence, you should serve both WebP and AVIF whenever possible to provide the fastest website load speed while still having the images render in all popular browsers including Google Chrome.

Next step in image optimization is lazy loading. With lazy load, only images in the viewport is loaded. As users scroll down the webpage, images are then subsequently loaded. This way, the full page does not need to be rendered on initially, decreasing the number of http requests and overall load time.

Use a Content Delivery Network

There are many different reasons why using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a best practice. One major reason is that it allows web pages to load faster and more reliably. It helps websites perform well by prioritizing specific locations on the site based on their priority. This means that high-traffic places like download buttons, sidebar navigation, and log-in flows will be driven first on your webpage loading list with other slower resources at later times to prevent overload. The concentration of connections in the CDN can result in the acceleration of website performance. Moreover, it reduces the response time and improves the speed of loading resources by hiding or caching what could slow down your pages.

Do note that not all CDN works with all your site assets such as images, Javascripts, CSS and videos. On most of my websites, I use BunnyCDN which comes included with EWWW Image Optimizer.

Unload Unused Styles and Scripts

Some plugins are not properly coded. Hence, they load unused styles and scripts on pages where they are not in used. A popular example is Contact Form 7, who’s scripts load on every page of your WordPress site, rather than only on pages you have embedded the shortcode. By preventing these styles and scripts from loading, you can reduce the number of http requests and page size for faster page load. The best tool for this job is WPShifty, which doesn’t just handle styles and scripts, but it even unloads plugins on pages. This is much more powerful as some plugins can load fonts as well. Otherwise, as a full image optimization package, SWIS Performance which is included as part of EWWW Image Optimizer would be the best value.

Final Thought

As the internet becomes a more important part of our lives, it is becoming increasingly important that websites load quickly. A fast-loading website means a positive experience for your customers and keeps them coming back for more. There is a number of plugins and strategies you can use to improve the website speed. For example, using a CDN is one way to boost high-inbound traffic on multiple content pages by placing copies in various locations around the world. You can also use Google PageSpeed Insights to measure your web performance. Paying for a reliable web server hosting solution increases performance with faster load times and greater access for others so that more webpages are loaded quickly at peak hours when visitors need them most.

At AccuWP, our team provides proven website speed optimization services to help you achieve higher organic search rankings and conversions.