In today’s digital era, digital marketing, with its fast-paced nature, is a world where every second counts–quite literally.
A few decades ago, Google officially verified that the website’s loading speed is a ranking component of its domain authority. As time went by, Google has come up with many updates that only made the importance of this one metric key critical.
A website that loads fast is not merely a ‘must have’ for users now-a-days but also plays a key part in your SEO strategy… and directly impacts the improvement of your search engine rankings and online visibility.
It is of utmost importance to see that your site loads at a very fast speed if you are to stay ahead of the game in the current digital bleeding edge era. A slow website will irritate users and lead to an increase in bounce rates and dramatically reduce the engagement. Conversely, a site with strong load times that keeps your users engaged will be much lower in the bounce rate. Moreover, the site can deliver an improvement in rankings on the SERPs.
This post will act as a platform for us to share with you how to optimize the site’s load time, starting from the HTML code cleaning to the hosting upgrading. I hope, YOU, the reader will benefit from this and will help your SEO conversion rates. Get more traffic your way 😊
Let’s get into the depths of how to get your site to load faster and keep your users – and search engines – happy.
1) Clean Up HTML Code: Effective HTML coding is quite essential as it greatly influences load time. Highlight and remove redundant tags…analyse and organize your code to achieve optimal performance.
a) Use PageSpeed Insights: In performing a similar kind of work for Googles PageSpeed Insights tool, you are the ultimate benefactor. It gives a deep and specific report that shows where the problem might be and what you can correct.
b) One time testing is fine, but I would suggest that it should be carried out more regularly on the popular and useful pages like blog pages, service pages, and category pages to track and understand your sites performance holistically.
2) Run Speed Tests: This test is when you watch your site come up on your screen, what you are watching for is what is loading the slowest. Be sure to use tools such as GTmetrix and Webpage Tracker to find the determinants and make the recommended improvements.
3) Optimize Images: Big and uncompressed visuals are a very common cause of websites being slow. Convert your images to a smaller format that won't harm your file quality and make your site super-fast. Tools like TinyPNG or JPEG-Optimizer can also be useful at times….
4) Upgrade Hosting: The speed of your site, even the availability, will be considerably impacted by the kind of web hosting. Budget hosting might be good enough for modest websites, but with higher quality hosting, your website will operate at significantly higher speeds. Plan your web hosting budget depending on your needs, target clientele etc
There you have it, your site will load faster and your users will engage.
In our next post we’ll look at how to identify and remove “zombie pages” from your site. These are pages that are old, redundant, or no longer serving a purpose.
By cleaning up your site and focusing on quality content you’ll improve user experience and SEO.
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