Why Website Speed is Important for SEO

There are countless factors that go into good website search engine optimization (SEO), and my goal is to not only introduce you to a few of them, but also to explain exactly why they matter and what to do about it. In this blog, I’m covering why website loading speed matters for SEO and what you can do to both evaluate and improve your own website.

Why does it matter?
When I talk about SEO, I think it sometimes comes across that Google (or Bing or any other search engine) is the ‘bad guy’ waiting to penalize you for an unknown reason and choosing to reward other websites arbitrarily. That couldn’t be further from the truth!

In reality, Google wants to create the best possible experience for its users. This means that they want searchers to find exactly what they want with the first try, stay on Google if possible (notice the featured snippets that load in so many searches now!), and have a great experience when they navigate to the website they choose.

When framed that way, it quickly becomes obvious why page load speed matters. If you tap or click on a website and it takes a long time to load (‘long time’ is relative, but you’ve experienced it), you may not wait for it to finish - and if you do, you’ll likely feel at least a moment of dissatisfaction. The engineers at Google know this, and they want to prevent any frustration, so their robots regularly crawl websites to determine how quickly the various elements load. The biggest things that slow down a website are images and complicated code that takes the browser awhile to figure out, and these will trigger Google to realize that the website is slow and therefore might not provide the best user experience.

How can I tell if my website is loading quickly?
Luckily, there are a few tools you can use to find out if your website is too slow.

PageSpeed Insights is Google’s website evaluator. Just type in your web address and you’ll get a full evaluation, along with what you can do to change any problem areas. Be aware that some platforms (Squarespace specifically) aren’t evaluated well using this tool, so if you’ve made changes and your score remains low, try another tool…

Pingdom is another free online tool that is a great ‘second opinion’ for your website, and will offer many of the same evaluation features as Google’s tool uses.

What can I do about slow page speeds?
If you used one of the above tools, you will walk away with a list of improvements, but either way, some of the biggest things to evaluate are:
-Image size: images should be optimized for the web, not for print! If you’re not sure how to do this, send me a message and I can help.
-Redirects: are there links on your website that are ‘broken’ and result in an error message? This is a huge no-no when it comes to SEO!
-Coding issues: this may or may not be something you can handle, but oftentimes back-end coding problems can slow down a website. If this is you, contact a web developer who can help you out!

Tell me: how did your website stack up? What changes will you make as a result?