Is Page Speed Important For SEO?
Is Page Speed Important For SEO?
You might be wondering whether page speed is important — but the question should be how important is page speed for SEO, and why? The answer is that it’s very important , for various reasons. But it’s not only important for SEO, it matters because the users visiting your site need to have a good experience; they will stick around longer if the content doesn’t load slowly. If people are frustrated just viewing your site, then they will just leave and likely never come back.
Google isn’t the only search engine, but it’s no doubt the most popular one. According to Google, page speed has been a factor for a long time now in their ranking algorithms — including for mobile devices as of July 2018.
So what can be done to improve my website’s speed?
Thankfully, there are several tools available that will help you achieve a faster website.
If you’re unsure whether your site is fast enough as it currently is, we highly suggest running some tests with these to get some insight!
You will need some technical know-how and/or help from a search engine to be able to figure out how to resolve all of the issues. The most common issue is needing to defer javascript, which the plugins below will help with. Note that it’s rather difficult to get perfect results on Google’s tool; if you’re really serious and struggling to do it on your own, you may be able to hire a freelancer from a site such as Fiverr.
Speeding up WordPress websites
There are multiple caching plugins that exist for WordPress sites. We have tried several of them, but recommend using the following.
Free, recommended caching plugins for knowledgeable users.
We suggest using all 3 of them together!
Paid, if you want the easiest to configure and best caching plugin for WordPress
Using WP Rocket, we have received excellent results on GTmetrix as shown below with just a few settings toggled on!
Although to be fair, for the second A we needed to enable long (1 year) browser cache, which can be configured through .htaccess, with a plugin, or Cloudflare if you’re using it. Whether it actually should be this long is questionable.
Other important speed factors
In addition to caching, image optimization (compression) is extremely important because it reduces load time, sometimes substantially depending on the server and user’s connection.
For WordPress, we recommend using Smush — it can also lazy load images, which is great! The free version works fine, but if you have a lot of images it will initially be slightly annoying because you’ll have to keep pressing continue after every 10 images. In the future, it can automatically optimize newly uploaded images.
Consider using a content delivery network (CDN) for ultra fast resource loading. WP Rocket has their own CDN network which is very reliable and affordable.