Why Page Speed Matters When you create or run a website or blog, one of the important factors to pay attention to is page speed. When studying SEO, you may come across the terms page speed and site speed. Some of you will think that page speed and site speed are the same.
Even though they are similar, page speed is not the same as site speed. Site speed is the average speed of several examples of web pages on a website.
To describe page speed, you often use the term "page load time". However, page speed is also usually described in terms of "time to first byte". By definition, page load time is the length of time required to display all the content of a particular web page, while time to first byte is the length of time required for a web browser to receive the first byte from the web server.
How much does page speed matter?
Page speed is an important factor that needs serious attention. Page speed is not only important as a ranking signal, but also for other things such as user experience, conversion rate and indexing. So, ignoring page speed not only has a bad impact on SEO, but also other important things.
1. One of the ranking signals
Google officially states that page speed is one of the signals used by its algorithm in determining the ranking of web pages. Thus, page speed has an impact on web page ranking. The faster a web page can load, the better it will rank in search engine results (SERP) compared to competing web pages for certain segments and keywords.
2. Affects user experience
Google always emphasizes providing a better user experience. One way to improve user experience is to ensure that your web pages load quickly. Don't disappoint visitors by waiting a long time for a web page to load or they will quickly leave your website and not want to come back again.
3. Affects conversion rates
Every website or web page is created for various purposes. For e-commerce, the web page will offer items that can be purchased online. There are also web pages created with the aim of making visitors willing to fill out a contact form, answer a survey or click a download button. Conversion will occur if visitors take action by purchasing goods, filling out contact forms, answering surveys or clicking download buttons.
If a web page does not load quickly, visitors will likely not open the web page. They are disappointed and then return to the search engine results page (SERP) to open another web page. Here, you have lost the potential for visitors to buy goods, fill out contact forms, answer surveys or click download buttons. Thus, the conversion rate becomes low.
4. Affects indexing
Every search engine has crawling robots called crawlers or spiders. For the Google search engine, Google has set what is called a crawl budget. Crawl budget is the number of URLs that a crawler or spider can or wants to crawl for each website. Each website has an allocated crawl budget.
In order for your articles to appear in search results, they must first be crawled and then indexed. When page speed is low, crawl intensity decreases and crawl budget is reached before all web pages are actually crawled. This causes new articles to be indexed longer. When this happens, you may lose opportunities.
What factors affect website speed?
Actually, there are quite a lot of factors that can influence whether page speed is good or not. Some of them are the hosting used, excessive use of images, uncompressed images, displaying too many advertisements, choosing themes or templates, excessive use of extensions, use of HTTP or HTTPS protocols, use of external multimedia and so on.
1. Hosting Server Used by the Website
The first important factor that influences the speed of a website is the hosting server used. As we know, there are several types of hosting itself. Among others:
- Shared hosting
- Cloud hosting
- And VPS
All of them are good to use with certain conditions. Don't be tempted by the cheap prices offered by hosting providers, it's a good idea to read reviews about the hosting provider that you are going to use.
Because a cheap price is not a guarantee of being good. But if you are really concerned about website speed then my suggestion is to just use a VPS. God willing, the speed will be whoosh whoosh. Haha
2. Internet Connection Used
No matter how fast the website is, if the internet connection used by us or potential visitors to our website is bad then the result will definitely be that the website speed will feel slow. So, make sure you analyze this section too.
For example like this...
Your website targets visitors from areas that don't have a very good internet connection. So don't be surprised if the bounce rate in the analysis results is bad.
3. Use large images
Images with large sizes will cause our website to feel slow. The recommended image size is 400 x 400 px. Google itself has released an image format that it says doesn't take up too much space. The format is Webp. Use the image compression plugin so that images can be compressed automatically when uploaded to the website.
4. Excessive use of WordPress plugins or addons
When we first learned to create a website. Usually all plugins seem to want to be installed. However, if too many plugins are installed, the website will slow down even more. So, only install important and useful plugins. Plugins that are usually installed and are very useful are:
- Button Share social
- Form for list building
- Caching plugins
- Anti-spam plugin
- SEO Plugins
- And security plugins
6. Website Theme Used
A website theme that is out of date or not SEO friendly can also usually cause the website to slow down. When choosing and installing a theme, make sure you look for a theme that has 5 star reviews or if you have a budget, you can use a premium (paid) theme. Read reviews of the theme you are going to install and make sure it says fast loading.
7. Spam
I've experienced this. I don't know where it came from, the Badoystudio website was infiltrated by spam. Where suddenly a redirect ad always appears when you want to click on the article. It turns out, when I investigated there was spam coming in. And investigate the spam coming from the plugin that I installed.
8. Fonts Used
The font used on a website also affects the speed of the website. For example, when creating a landing page we use Google fonts whose font name itself is unfamiliar. Maybe you think the font is nice and unique. But the fact is that the Google fonts we use can be the cause of our website being slow.
Why is that, because the website has to load first to download the font in the browser so this takes a few seconds. So, it's better to just use a standard font. Such as Arial, Calibri, Times New Roman, and others.
How to improve PageSpeed Insights?
There are several ways you can increase page speed. Some methods are general, meaning this method does not depend on the platform used to create a website or blog. Others are built-in platform features. You can read the article Joomla website performance or effective ways to reduce page load time which explains every way to increase page speed.
Obtaining perfect performance is achieved by obtaining perfect grades or scores. Getting a perfect grade or score is not easy and cannot be obtained instantly. So how do you increase your website's Pagespeed Insight value or score? Come on, let's look at the explanation.
1. Compress Image Size
Displaying images on website or blog content is an effective way to attract readers' attention so they don't get bored and helps readers understand the contents of the website or blog. However, not many people know, the images displayed on a website or blog can be the cause of the slow speed of the website or blog when opened. Images that are too large can drastically slow down website speed. Therefore, it is necessary to compress the images before uploading them to the website or blog.
There are several services that can be used to compress images without damaging their quality. You can compress it before uploading it to WordPress by using image compression services such as TinyPNG, ILoveIMG, Trimage, and Kraken. Apart from that, you can compress WordPress using an image optimization plugin.
WordPress provides several plugins so that the images on your website still make your website perform optimally. There are several recommended plugins that can support your website's ability to remain optimal, namely Imagify Image Optimizer, ShortPixel Image Optimizer, WP Smush, and Optimus Image Optimizer.
2. Use Litespeed Cache on the Web
Cache is a process of temporarily storing data or HTML pages and images on a website to reduce bandwidth usage and server loading. In other words, cache is a technology that is able to display website pages more quickly.
When a visitor opens a website for the first time, the browser caching system will store data on the page the visitor opens, from logos, images to content. Thus, when a visitor opens the website for the second time and so on, the visitor's browser does not need to make a request to the server to display the same data. This is because the caching browser has stored this data on the visitor's computer so that it can display website pages more quickly.
Activating browser caching is quite easy, which can be done with the help of a plugin. There are many plugins available on WordPress that you can choose from. If you use a hosting service that has the LiteSpeed Web Server feature, you should use Litespeed cache. Apart from providing a browser caching feature, Litespeed cache is a perfect combination with Litespeed Web Server.
3. Use Cloudflare CDN
Cloudflare is a content delivery network that acts as a proxy between websites and visitors. Serving static content caches from nearby locations (Cloudflare has many servers spread across several countries), this makes loading on a website faster. In other words, Cloudflare acts as a liaison between visitors and the website server. The goal is to prevent the website from malicious attacks carried out by website visitors.
By using Cloudflare services, your website is guaranteed to be safe from various types of attacks and activities that can damage your performance. Apart from that, Cloudflare serves all website requests and can offer more useful services compared to traditional CDNs.
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a group of geographically distributed servers that work together to provide fast delivery of internet content. One of the benefits of using a CDN is that the website becomes lighter. Sharing website traffic to a CDN will make it easier to manage traffic and increase or decrease it in a short time. This can take the load off the origin server and can help minimize downtime.
4. Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Manify is a process of removing unnecessary characters in the code to be executed. Reducing repetitive data is not important in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, this action will not reduce quality in the browser.
The speed of your website can be optimized by carrying out a compression process. The compression process is not only needed for images but also for HTML, CSS and JavaScript code. Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript will quickly read the data on your website pages.
5. Use a website theme that is mobile friendly
You can display responsive mobile versions for all types of resolutions, also use the correct fonts, and have a good navigation system. Using a mobile friendly website theme will make your website look good even if it is opened on various types of devices.
6. Choose the Right Hosting Server Location
There are currently hosting server location options, such as local Indonesian servers, Asia Pacific servers, European servers and USA servers. To get good performance, of course you have to choose the right hosting server location. There are server locations in almost every country, but the quality varies.
To get the right hosting server location, there are several tips you can use:
- Get to know the target audience of your website
- Know the type of website you are creating
- Pay attention to the access speed
- Close to internet exchange
- Adjust to your budget
For those of you who have a target audience from Indonesia, the right server choice is the Indonesian server. However, for those of you who target website visitors from various countries, you can choose a US server.
7. Reducing Useless Plugins when Using Wordpress Web
If there are features that are not needed, you can reduce the software code which functions to run additional features in the application or program. The aim is to reduce useless plugins so that the website you open has fast speed.
Conclusion
Once you know the factors above that can affect website speed. Now is the time for you to analyze the website that you have. Are there several factors above that prevent your website speed from meeting your expectations?
One of the SEO factors is website speed. But that doesn't mean that a fast website will immediately get a good ranking on Google. There are other influencing factors.
So, it's best not to worry too much about website speed. As long as it's not too slow, your website's SEO will still be good. That's a brief review of the factors that influence website speed. More or less sorry. Hopefully this is useful and don't forget to share it with your other friends too.