Does page speed affect seo?

What is page speed and why is it important for SEO Page speed is a term used to describe how quickly a website’s pages load. Really slow websites tend to rank worse than normal or fast websites. You can test the speed of your site in Page Speed Insights (Google) or Pingdom page speed test. Image of Google page speed insights of a fast web page that should work well for SEO

Image of Google page speed insights of a fast web page that should work well for SEO

This page which you are visiting at the moment have 100, full points, in Google Page Speed Insights.

Tips for optimizing your site for page speed

When it comes to optimizing your website for page speed, there are a few things you can do to make sure your pages are loading as quickly as possible. Here are a few tips:

1. Optimize your images.

Make sure your images are the correct size and resolution, and that they are compressed as much as possible. Do not load a image with a width of 3000 px if your content's width is only 1000 px. Also, when saving images (in Photoshop for example), do not use the highest quality setting. Use the lowest possible that is not compromising the visual quality of the image. If you have a CMS, make sure that it automatically compress the images to the right size and quality if the editors themselves are not fixing it.

2. Optimize your videos.

Make sure your videos are encoded properly and that they are streamed from a fast server. Embedding videos from YouTube is often faster than uploading them to the site. To further optimize for speed on pages with videos, you can just show an image thumbnail, and not load the video until someone clicks that one.

3. Optimize your website's code.

Make sure your website's code is clean and well-organized, and that there are no unnecessary elements or code bloat. Make sure that the code and scripts that are loaded before the content are absolutely essential. Move the code and scripts that are not essential for when the user lands on the page further down in the code, preferably to the end.

4. Avoid external scripts

Avoid external scripts that are not used by the most of your users. Do you really need the "tweet button" on every page even if only less than a percentage of users actually use it? I think not. Remove all extra scripts that are not essential to the user.

5. Use a fast server (hosting) and a content delivery network (CDN).

Put some extra money in hosting. Do not go for the cheapest host. Look for someone that gives you the bandwidth and server speed you need. A CDN can also help deliver your content to users faster by caching it on servers around the world. One of the most common ones is Cloudflare. For smaller sites, a fast server is more important than looking at implementing a CDN though.

Questions and answers about page speed and seo

How do I measure my page speed?

You can test the speed of your site in Page Speed Insights (Google) or Pingdom page speed test. You can also check Google Search Console's page speed reports or even sort your pages by load time in Google Analytics

Is a fast loading website more likely to rank higher?

There is no one definitive answer to this question. However, Google has stated that page speed is one of the factors that they consider when ranking a website. A slow-loading page can negatively impact SEO, as well as user experience.

Why is my website slow?

There could be a number of reasons why your website is slow. Here are a few common ones:

You are not using a fast server (hosting).
Your website's code is not clean or well-organized.
You are using external scripts that are not essential to the user.
You have a lot of large images or videos on your page.