Website Speed Optimization

Today, most companies know all about SEO and its importance and tend to focus on what they think users and crawl bots want. They can easily overlook one fundamental aspect of the internet that draws in users and bots alike: speed. 

If you’re a business owner, do not miss the simplest yet most impactful aspect of digital marketing: web speed optimization. While some businesses create elaborate website designs full of significant visual elements, they don’t track how long their sites take to load or how many customers they are losing. The best Digital Marketing agencies in Pune ensure web speed optimization as one of their essential and high-priority services for all clients because of its value. 

Web page speed optimization is a highly essential aspect that all website owners must cater to. The speed of your website and pages have a significant impact on a website’s SEO ranking and bounce rate. The slowdown of economic activity in the last year has led to the boom of eCommerce and digital transformation. Due to this, consumers expect companies to provide websites that are functional, secure, and above all, fast.

This article lays down why web speed optimization is vital for SEO in 2021 and how you can improve your website to perfection.

Why is Web Speed Optimization Essential for SEO in 2021 

Google indicates that site speed and page speed are aspects checked by its algorithm to rank pages accurately. Additionally, a slow page or site speed means that search engine crawlers can crawl fewer pages, which could negatively affect your site’s indexation. Effective web speed optimization is highly integral to your website’s success, and here are a few reasons to prove it: 

Increases Engagement and Conversions: 

Over 70% of internet consumers agree that website speed optimization hugely impacts their motivation to buy products and services. The figure showcases the reality of web performance and how it can make or break a sale or conversion. Speed today is directly relevant to customer satisfaction. High-speed websites appeal to consumers to stay longer, browse products, engage with engaging content, and make actual purchases. Marketers and website owners must take the proper steps to ensure minimum loading speed and prioritize web speed. 

Optimizing media and visual elements can help save bytes and improve the overall performance of your site. The critical aspect to remember is that numerous users are on a website simultaneously, and the website needs to load all assets fast on all screens. If it cannot do so, customers tend to get frustrated and bounce to a competitor’s website instead. 

Automates Content Optimization: 

Efficient delivery of content on an image-by-image and user-by-user basis could be highly time-consuming for any professional. There are various factors to consider and optimize, like file formats, vision algorithms, or even browser behavior. A visitor using mobile devices or smart devices does not have to see the same high-resolution elements as desktop users, but the site needs to load at the same speed for both. 

AI tools for cropping images, sizing and aligning to fit, and repackaging content and files into various delivery formats need to be employed for easy adaptation and optimizing files for all devices. It is essential for website owners to manage these tools and optimize their page speed to deliver properly packaged, fast-loading website content across various devices, so customers can remain engaged and stay on your site longer. Web speed optimization ensures that teams can save valuable time by integrating automated capabilities with fast CDN delivery. 

Get Data-Driven Performance Insights 

Improving your overall web performance requires web owners to collect valuable insights relevant to visitor behavior, traffic rate, bounce rates, and more. Businesses need to analyze reports on the audio and visual elements on their website, which contributes to monthly bandwidth and helps determine which parts are slowing your website down. By using web speed optimization tools, companies can get these essential insights along with the ability to look at usage patterns at any moment. This is integral to allow web developers to make changes and optimize media delivery and performance-based decisions. Web speed optimization can help companies save money and time and make necessary changes immediately to avoid lousy ranking or disturbed reputations. 

Improves Overall SEO 

The most fundamental reason for implementing web speed optimization is that it is one of the most critical metrics that most search engines like Google use to rank a website. Since web speed plays a huge role in how a customer feels about your website, how long they stay on it if they return, and more, all of which highly impact your SEO. Media optimization on your website also significantly affects your website’s core by improving loading time, the responsiveness of your website, and content stability. 

Marketers need to keep in mind that search engines do not take well to slow-loading pages, and neither do consumers. By improving web speed, companies can get a much higher ranking on the SERP and improve their overall visibility and increase traffic to the website. 

How is Page Speed Calculated? 

Page speed is calculated in a few different ways, including essential metrics employed by search engine algorithms. Those are: 

Time to first byte (TTFB)

TTFB is the duration of time, in seconds, it takes to load the first byte of information on a web page. It is an excellent indication of the server loading time. 

Time to Interactive (TTI)

TTI is the time it takes for a web page to load interactive elements and shows if particular javascript elements are slowing down your website. 

First contentful paint (FCP)

FCP refers to the time it takes for the first element of your website’s content to load. The element could be a text element, image, or even SVG.

Load time

Load time refers to how much time it takes to load a web page with all its elements fully and is probably one of the essential metrics for both SEO and users. 

How To Effectively Improve Website Speed? 

Now that the importance of web speed optimization is evident let us learn how to improve the website speed. Here is a list of the best practices, according to experts, for improving your web speed and overall website performance. 

1. Choose a Reliable and Secure Web Hosting Platform

A Reliable and fast hosting platform or web hosting provider is a must to allow your brand to provide high-quality services seamlessly. With better performance and security on the table, your web host should be a top priority. You want to secure a web host provider that can offer you easy management of numerous web pages without installing a hundred plugins that you cannot keep track of. 

The web host you pick directly impacts website and web page speed and aspects like security, speed, functionality, and so on. Be wise in choosing your web host platform or provider to ensure that your website is always working up to par with set standards and can satisfy your customers, not annoy them. You must also see that your provider will always offer immediate assistance if your servers are down and can get the website up and running in no time to avoid a bad reputation. 

2. Optimize Your Media 

Companies need to implement good media optimization practices like compression of images across different devices without sacrificing quality, serving images in all formats, including WebP, lazy loading of all static content, and more. Your web developer can use file compression apps that can rescue the size of the CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files. With this, the browser will be capable of loading many such files much faster, allowing you to increase your website speed and SEO score effectively. 

3. Enable Full Page Cache

Full-page caching is the process in which the pages of your website are stored as HTML files on a server after they load for the first time. The entire page and its contents from the database are shown only on a consumer’s first visit to your site. All other users receive the page directly from the server’s memory, which can enable your website to become substantially faster. 

4. Optimize Front-End 

You will need to reduce the actual size of your web page and improve loading speed by enabling various front-end optimizations, including minifying CSS files, optimizing fonts, and much more. It is also advised to use a content delivery network or CDN to reduce the overall time it takes for your visitors to lay a page. CDN can change your content across an entire network of servers and load your site from a server closest to each visitor. 

Optimizing your website speed is a lengthy and consistent process, which requires a lot of maintenance and awareness of numerous SEO rules. Creating beautiful, authentic websites is only one-half of the game, but creating fully functional, responsive, and fast websites is where the real challenge lies. India’s best digital marketing companies often ensure web speed optimization as a top priority and an integral aspect of web design and development. Leverage the benefits of a dedicated team of experts with access to the latest tools, who will work on ensuring that your website is fully functional and super fast at highly affordable costs! If you want to see substantial improvement in your website’s performance, hire a company like TTDigitals.