Website speed is very crucial for your company’s online presence. Why is it essential? Consumers want to be in and out of your website quickly, and if the load speed is slow, then there is a high chance they will bounce off immediately, especially from a mobile device. This could lead to your site speed significantly affecting your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rankings on Google for mobile and desktop as a high bounce rate could cause a negative effect.
As of this writing, the current Google algorithm, “Page Experience”, will be rolling out in August 2021. Some of the updates are:
- Core Web Vitals are used to measure user experience. There are three specific page speed and user interaction measurements that include: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), visual stability with Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and interactivity with First Input Delay (FID). Here are some tools that can help you measure and monitor Core Web Vitals.
- The page needs to be mobile-friendly. If you want to check to make sure your page is, use this Mobile-Friendly Test.
- Making sure your page is set on safe browsing. This means the page doesn’t contain malicious (for example, malware) or deceptive (for example, embedded content to trick visitors) content. To check to make sure your site does not have safe-browsing issues use the Security Issues report.
- The page is to be served over HTTPS. Make sure to check if your site’s connection is secure. If the page is not served over HTTPS, you can learn how to secure your site with HTTPS.
- Consumers have easy access to the content on the page. Learn how interstitials can make content less accessible for the user.
With this new algorithm rolling out, Google will begin to use page experience as a part of its ranking systems in August 2021.
This is very important for your SEO, and web speed does hurt the user’s experience. With Google’s updated speed requirements going from three to four-second load to two seconds, the slower the page loads, the more user experience goes down.
A study has also proven that 5 million desktop and mobile pages found that the average time it takes to load a web page for desktop entirely is 10.3 seconds and 27.3 seconds on mobile. Back in 2019, mobile minutes accounted for 77% of consumers’ time spent online in the United States. Mobile, as well, has more problems with loading pages than desktops do for consumers.
With one of the new updates in Page Experience being mobile-friendly, optimizing your mobile website design is imperative as it is the preferred method by consumers. Your mobile speed time slower than desktop will have a negative effect on your Google rankings.
Here are some reasons why your website speed might be high:
- Server delays, which are the response time on serves, should be under 200ms. Different potential factors could slow down the server response, but there are three main categories: slow application logic, insufficient hardware resources, and slow network connection.
- Unnecessary redirects make your visitor face additional time waiting for an HTTP request-response cycle to be complete, which is the complete opposite you want for your customers.
- Having any CSS, HTML, or JavaScript that are larger than 150 bytes will cause a slower response time for your website.
- Having heavy images and fancy animated effects. The smaller amount of bytes a browser has to download, the faster that browser will download and render content on the screen. This is very crucial for mobile users because images can still cause delays on mobile devices.
Improving your website’s speed will upgrade user experience and conversions. First, you will need to measure the website’s current pace, which there are other online site tolls like GTmetric and Pingdom, to name a few that will help measure. As mentioned above, slow or overloaded servers usually cannot load graphics and elements on a page quickly as consumers would expect.
When it comes to assessing user experience, you will want to run a UX audit to see how well your site is performing as users click from page to page as well as asking these questions:
- Do desktop and mobile load the same? Is it easier or harder to navigate on mobile?
- Does your navigation load quickly?
- Did enough content load in the first two seconds to get engagement from visitors?
- Can users interact with the page within 2 seconds of loading?
- Are interactions smooth and fast with no lag?
After asking these questions and running the audit, things you can do to improve the speed consist of reducing the number of landing page redirects, plugins, and link shorteners. Another thing is to reduce/compress the image sizes and optimize smaller file sizes to lessen the mobile rendering time without destroying visual quality. In addition, you can remove render-blocking JavaScript and redundant data that is taking up space. Lastly, using asynchronous scripts to streamline page render time can help, just like using a script to adjust the content to match slower connections and devices dynamically.
If you are unsure how to fix some of these things and are interested in improving your website’s speed and SEO, contact Fisher Design and Advertising at [email protected].