SEO: Increasing the Speed of a Website, Increases Conversions
This busy Autumn/Winter period I was thinking about whether and how to optimize this blog, since I have labored long to give advice about "speeding" of WordPress and other static websites with our clients. It's a hard thing to put across to a client sometimes as the site looks like it loads quickly but in the background there can be an enormous amount of script which is in fact depleting the potential search engine ranking of the site and is of course not good for SEO. But I thought I would start with our blog to test some things and here is the overview.
In search of a the solutions for page speed I stumbled upon two short articles on the blog of Mozilla Metrics which you may find interesting if you know the lingo. But in layman's terms, when we worked on speeding up this blog using the right techniques, we saw a 30% increase in visitors. This is why we have website speed/load time as part of every SEO service we undertake.
Page Speed, SEO and Page Ranking - Very Close Friends
Here are some basic pointers for page speed and how they may affect your rank and visitors:
1 Large websites with many pages, heavy images and unnecessary scripts in the actual visible code can take anywhere from 7-15 seconds to load fully. If this is the case with your site, then it is time for some spring cleaning!
2Heavy images take the toll on your website. This error occurs primarily on personal or "quick" websites where the designer or you have simply pulled an image from your computer (raw from a digital camera or large stock photo) and then re sized it to your preference. Without compressing the image and making it web-ready, you are directly attacking your user experience and adding to your page load time. You may have seen this on other websites where an image is slowly appearing like an electric blind.
3Adding lots of "gadgets" or "widgets" to your website can increase the load time. Let's say you or your web designer added some external code to your site like a facebook group or real time twitter feed or advertisements hosted elsewhere. Your website has to "call" for all of these scripts to someone else's server, which means you are dependant on their speed.
4Reducing page load time to 1 second has led to increased conversions +2.7% - so you can imagine for larger sites getting 100K+ visitors a month, this would be a considerable increase. For smaller sites it simply builds the road to good SEO and traffic in the future.
5Reducing page load time to 2.2 seconds has resulted in an increase in conversions +15.4%. This figure is miraculous and definitely worth implementing.
Why Page Speed is Important
Google works in mysterious ways, but the above observation can be summed up in one goal which I greatly respect Google for - Creating a rich, fast user experience on the web where users can rapidly find content related to their searches. No one wants to sit and wait for a page to load, and this is why fast websites rank higher.
Note: Don't ruin the user experience by removing everything for a fast website, just to get extra load time. Broad shooting your website by getting rid of everything that makes the experience can also be detrimental to your site.
If you have any questions contact a member of our London SEO team to review everything and provide suggestions for your web designer.
I hope this helps a little.
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Interesting. I didn`t know improving that the improving the speed of a website would increase conversion as well. I`ve heard that 4 seconds is the maximum amount of time people want to wait for a site. If it takes longer the visitor would leave the site.
But what is the right way to balance everthing? Google loves rich content pages. So everyone is adding text, pictures and videos. All these additional things make your site slower. Or is this not a problem as long as the home loads quick? usually thats the attention getter on your website. What would you recommend?
Hi Nicky, videos an images are ok if they are made web-ready. Use photoshop for image web saving and for videos us youtube or vimeo embed. Quick Time player also converts videos for the web and will export a heavy video file with the optimised version and html code for embedding it on your site.