How page load time can effect SEO in 2021

 

Over the past few years the internet has been getting faster and faster, mostly due to the availability of high speed internet connections like broadband. Many webmasters however overlook page load times forgetting that many visitors may still not be using high speed internet connections.

The fact is that page speed is very important to users, studies have proven over and over again that web users like fast websites. If a web page takes a long time to lead then their is a high chance that you might lose a potential sale, a user will simply click on the next relevant result that has a faster website.

There has also been a lot of talk recently about Google introducing page speed into their algorithm. Why wouldn’t they? Google’s mission is to create the best result for a user, and is the best result a slow site that users don’t like? Search engines also prefer a high content to code ratio, meaning that reducing the code in the page makes the search spiders life a little easier. For most sites this should not be a huge concern, only a really slow site will not get indexed properly and could get punished by Google.

But how do you know if your site is fast enough? There are now many tools which you can use to test page speed they include

Google Page Speed Tool

Google page speed tool . This page speed tool is an open source Firefox extension that provides information as to what is slowing your page down. This tool is for technical people, and details anything which is reducing performance including combining CSS files, browser caching, combine external JavaScript plus much more. Well worth looking into to improve performance.

Google Site Performance

To enforce Google’s stance on page speed they introduced the site performance tool into their Google Webmaster tools service, this tool again provides suggestions from Google as to how to make your site faster. You can find the site performance tool under the labs section in Google Webmaster Tools.

The tool will even show site performance over time, to show you if your changes have improved performance, which is great.