Building backlinks increases your online visibility. It allows you to attract new visitors, not just from SERPs but also from other websites. Additionally, it establishes that your website is trustworthy. However, SEO is more than just building backlinks.
Picture this: a user found a link to your website from another one. They clicked on it. However, your website took a lot of seconds to load completely. What do you think the user will do? How will it affect your website's ranking?
This article will cover these topics. Here is how website speed impacts SEO and the user experience.
The Problem with Slow Websites
So, a user has found your website, but they are met with slow loading times. If they are patient, they will wait for it to finish loading. However, according to Google, most users don't have that patience. They will leave your website after three seconds.
Their abrupt departure sets a chain of events. Sadly, none of these work in your favor.
First, it will increase the bounce rate for your website. It measures how fast the visitor leaves your website after viewing one page. It tells search engines if they found something valuable from your website or not. Since they left early, it means they gained nothing from their visit, or they did not like what they saw. Google will see that as a sign that your website is not recommendable.
Visitors quickly leaving your website also affects dwell time. It's the opposite of the bounce rate. It measures how long the visitor stays on your website. Longer dwell times indicate that your content meets the user's search intent.
How To Improve Your Website Speed
Creating well-written content and designing a visually stunning website is for nothing if visitors instantly leave your website. Thus, you should prioritize optimizing for page speed. You should pay attention to several elements and enable some features to improve its performance. Here is a list of these elements and features:
HTTP Requests
When a user visits your website, their browser communicates with the server. It sends a separate HTTP request for every element in your website. Then, the server will respond by sending the requested resources. That said, the more elements there are, the longer this process will take.
To reduce the number of requests, you should limit the use of images. After the extra ones are removed, compress the ones that remain. Additionally, remove heavy plugins. If your website needs them, try to look for lighter alternatives.
Images
Browsers have to download the images on your website to display them. It affects the loading speed. To accelerate it, you can remove some images. You can also speed up the downloading speed by compressing your images. Use reliable tools to minimize quality loss.
Additionally, use file formats like JPG, PNG, and WEBP. The SVG format is also a good choice for logos and other flat images since you can scale them without losing quality.
Lazy Loading
Lazy loading is a technique that can help you improve website speed. With this, the elements that are not yet visible on the screen are not loaded immediately. It only loads them when the user scrolls to see them. That creates an illusion that makes the users think your website is already fully loaded. As such, it increases the chances of them staying on your website and checking your content.
Hosting Service
The server that stores your website has a huge impact on its performance. Outdated ones may cause technical glitches and errors. Also, shared hosts may not be able to keep up with heavy traffic on popular websites. All of these could slow down your website.
You should also not overlook the location of your website. The nearer it is to your target audience, the faster your website will be.
Dedicated server hosting is the best solution. It offers not only good website speed but also great security. However, this option is also the most expensive. Not all businesses can afford that. But if the timing is right, you could take advantage of Black Friday dedicated server hosting deals that make it more affordable.
Dead, Extra, and Redundant Codes
You should revisit your code to minify it. Look for dead codes, redundant codes, and extra lines that can be removed.
Dead codes are codes that are executed but do nothing for the website. Redundant codes are lines of code that do the same thing as previous lines. While looking for these, you should remove extra lines that do not affect the functionality of your website. That includes comments, line breaks, and empty spaces.
While monitoring tools, plugins, chatbots, and tracking pixels offer additional features, they also add more lines of code. Assess whether or not you still need them, and remove them if they are no longer useful.
Browser Caching
Browser caching improves your website speed for revisiting users. On their first visit, the website loads just like how it loads for everyone else. However, it keeps some of the downloaded data. That includes images, CSS, Javascript, and so on. Because the user's browser does not need to re-download these resources, the website will load fast in future visits.
Some website hosting servers offer browser caching. If the one you choose does not, you need to download a plugin yourself.
Conclusion
Website speed heavily impacts SEO and user experience. Search engines will not recommend slow websites to users. Yes, people can find your website through backlinks. But they will also leave if it does not load quickly, which increases your bounce rate.
With that in mind, you should optimize the website elements so that they are easy to download. Also, reduce clutter by removing extra images and codes. Choosing a reliable web host will also work wonders. Enabling lazy loading and browser caching is also recommended.
With these, you can speed up your website, providing your visitors with a pleasant user experience. Ultimately, that will lead to higher conversions.
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