How Boosting Website Page Speed Can Improve SEO for Small Businesses
Do you run a WordPress site? Need to make your website faster?
Page speed matters to your website visitors. It’s not just about boosting SEO and getting a perfect PageSpeed Insights score. It’s also about boosting conversions and reducing the bounce rate. It should be one of your top priorities for boosting your online business success.
Landing a perfect PageSpeed Insights score on Google can be difficult for small businesses. But it doesn’t have to stay that way!
In this post, we will show you how boosting website page speed will get you more site visitors with no extra effort!
Why Page Speed Matters?
Page speed matters because it affects your search engine optimisation (SEO).
Slow websites have a hard time ranking for keywords in search engine results pages (SERPS). These sites can be overlooked by potential customers who are browsing the internet on their smartphone or tablet. Longer load times may even cause you to lose site visitors completely, which can affect your sales and profits.
Having a fast loading speed can help to keep visitors on the site for longer by taking less time to load, boosting their confidence in you and making them more likely to buy. It also gives Google a strong signal that your website is fast and responsive which will positively affect how it ranks against other sites.
This means higher rankings for long-tail keywords and more visitors to your website.
Are You Thinking About Mobile Users?
Mobile users now make up over half of total internet usage. Around 64% of mobile phone owners are using their device while watching TV. And 56% of people browse the internet from mobile devices.
If your website is too slow, you’re giving them a reason to go elsewhere. It makes sense to design websites for mobile users to make sure the time they spend on your site is as rewarding as possible.
If you’re not reducing your page loading time, it could be costing you money.
People will leave if the content takes too long to load or doesn’t meet their needs. And that’s bad news for businesses like yours trying to grow online.
Why Is Page Speed Important?
Page loading time is one of the most important factors to consider when it comes to boosting SEO. The higher a website’s page load speed, the more likely visitors will stay on your site and browse around for longer periods of time.
In fact, according to an Aberdeen study conducted in 2016, approximately 44% of users report that slow webpage speeds were the main reason they left a website. That’s almost half of your potential visitors!
Even if the majority of people don’t exit your site, long page loading times can still affect SEO negatively. This can slow down search engine crawlers, preventing them from accessing all the content on your pages, which will ultimately decrease its ranking in SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).
Does Boosting Website Page Speed Matter?
Page speed has a direct correlation with conversion rates. When page speed is slow, users will spend less time browsing your site and more of their attention span begins to dwindle. Given that an average internet user has around an 8-second attention span, this can mean the difference between getting the sale or not converting at all.
Page loading times are also important because they have a direct impact on how many pages your users will be willing to read. Or just leave your site increasing your bounce rate. A study by Akamai found that 44% of site visitors don’t make it past the first page if the loading time is over about one second, and 66% won’t go beyond two seconds.
The most effective way for boosting conversion rates is to build a website that loads quickly.
Benefits for Small Businesses With WordPress Websites
This speed-boosting focus by search engine giants like Google and Bing, as well as other companies such as Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo!, has been fuelled in large part because of customer demand. People want websites they visit to load quickly so they can enjoy surfing the net.
Google has been lowering its rankings to sites that load slowly and penalising them by not showing up on the first pages of search engine results. This is because Google wants its customers to have a fast browsing experience.
In a study by the Aberdeen Group, 91% of respondents said they were less likely to return to websites that take more than three seconds to load.
This is why boosting website page speed can improve SEO for WordPress sites. WordPress site owners run the risk of too many plugins slowing their site down. And many WordPress dedicated hosting companies are in price competition to compete.
This means they can overload the number of websites on their servers creating slower than expected speeds.
How Does Bounce Rate Correlate to Page Speed?
Page loading time can have a profound effect on bounce rate. Generally, the lower your page speed is, the more people will bounce from your website and not stay for long enough to browse through it.
By increasing page loading speed, you make your website more accessible for people to browse through. This reduces bounce rate and helps your visitors find the information or advice they are looking for. And increases your reputation with the search engines. This in turn moves you up search engine ratings and leads to more visitors finding your website.
Google Page Speed Insights
There are a lot of factors that affect the loading time for your website. Here’s how boosting page speed can improve SEO for small business owners with WordPress websites:
- Google ranks higher sites with high page loading times in search results
- Higher rankings lead to more traffic and a better customer experience, boosting your conversion rate
- Lower hosting costs thanks to lower bandwidth consumption
- Google now adopts a mobile-first approach, so it is important your content is optimised for mobile devices
- WordPress websites should Install plugins that compress your images without quality loss, like EWWW Image Optimizer or Smush.it for WordPress
What Is Google Page Speed Insights – How Does It Work?
Google Page Speed Insights is a tool that rates how well your website loads and provides recommendations for improving the page loading time.
How can boosting Website Page Speed improve SEO for small business owners with WordPress websites?
The Google Page Speed Insights tool measures the loading time of your website and provides a score on how well it loaded. The higher the score, the better. What does this mean for SEO?
A slower page load speed will result in an increased bounce rate which can lead to dropping page rank or even being dropped from search engine rankings altogether.
There are certain factors Google takes into account to determine the page loading time of your website. These include:
- Size and weight
- Network connectivity
- Server response time as well as
- Browser performance
Why Is Page Speed Important For SEO
Website visitors are more likely to return if the page loads fast. They will spend more time on your site because it’s not frustrating or annoying to load pages. Google uses page loading times as one of their ranking factors for organic search results (the higher the better). So boosting website speed can actually improve the visibility of your website in search engine results.
Google, in their Webmaster Guidelines, mention that they want a site to be “quickly responsive.” And to provide visitors with the content or action they’re looking for as soon as possible.
In other words, page loading speed is important because it affects your visitor experience. If your website takes too long to load, not only do your visitors leave early, but search engines start penalising you for not being user-friendly.
Why Do I Need to Optimise My Site Performance?
WordPress hosting can have a major impact on how fast your site loads. If you’re using shared hosting, there’s no way to control the resources it has available for your website.
Small business owners with websites that are slow and not mobile-friendly will be penalised by Google in search rankings. They won’t rank well against competitors who have faster mobile-friendly sites.
If a website takes too long to load on someone’s phone or tablet, they’ll click off the page before it even finishes loading.
Optimising your web pages for speed will increase your search engine rankings and visitor time on site. And boosting conversion rates for businesses. This will improve SEO for your small business WordPress site.
The Changing Landscape of SEO
When looking at boosting website page speed, there is a good amount of technical stuff to be sure about. And when it is essential to have a fast loading well-designed website you’ll want to make sure that you are on top of it all.
- Are images appropriately sized for the web?
- Are there any unnecessary plugins or widgets on your site?
- Are all your scripts combined together in a single file when possible and
- Are there any unneeded CSS rules slowing your website down?
Google has moved mobile-first. Has your digital marketing strategy kept up with these changes? Get in touch with us for SEO Staffordshire website design.
