Here are some recommendations for making your website speedier, as well as information on how page speed relates to user experience and SEO.
Google’s Core Web Vitals demonstrate the connection between website speed and user experience.
Visitors will leave if a page on your website takes too long to load. That is not brand-new.
Google predicted many years ago that increasing your site’s load time from one to five seconds would cause 90% of visitors to abandon it.
Therefore, a slow site will affect your performance even if your website has a good Google ranking.
Why? Because when user experience suffers, visitors will leave your website without making a purchase, reading your content, or interacting with it.
However, the influence of speed extends far beyond the user experience. Speed is a crucial element, as stated by Core Web Vitals.
What are Core Web Vitals?
A group of measures called Core Web Vitals (CWVs) are used to assess user experience. They track the following metrics for users on desktop and mobile:
- Loading quickly
- Responsiveness of a page
- Visual constancy
- To give SEOs and site owners user-centric, practical measures to gauge usability, CWVs were introduced in 2020. The three critical components of CWVs are as follows:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Examines how quickly a page loads. LCP accounts for the initial 2.5 seconds of a page’s loading.
First Input Delay (FID): Measures the responsiveness of a page action to a response.
The visual stability of a page is measured by cumulative layout shift (CLS).
CWVs strive to provide a technical SEO component emphasising usability and page experience.
Understanding Page Experience
Google utilises page experience as a ranking factor to determine “how visitors perceive the experience of engaging with a web page.” Page experience contains Core Web Vitals.
The search engine strives to provide users with the most relevant results. It might not be the ideal delivery outcome if a site is slow, not responsive or accessible, and performs poorly on mobile.
Several signals, including influence page experience
- Core Web Vitals
- Mobile-friendliness
- HTTPS
- Non-intrusive interstitials
How Page Speed Relates to SEO & User Experience
According to Google’s statement on page experience, visibility in the search results may increase if all other factors are equal.
Page experience is thus another factor under your control to increase your site’s visibility on the SERPs, albeit there are other things you should pay attention to.
DMA On-Page SEO Services can help to boost the user experience that you are looking for.
Page speed is essential because it dramatically impacts Core Web Vitals and will help all three. Running a PageSpeed Insights analysis will help you identify areas that need work.
Here are some strategies for solving page speed difficulties.
1. Minify Coding
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can all be optimised. You can minify your code using various tools, including HTMLMinifier, CSSNano, and UglifyJS.
2. Remove Unused Coding
Remove any unnecessary JavaScript or CSS code. Every little thing helps your site load faster and lower file sizes.
3. Caching
Caching can be installed at the application level.
Caching plugins are available for WordPress and most other CMS platforms, which will lighten the burden on your site’s database and significantly increase CWVs.
Memcached could be required to prevent bottlenecks if your website frequently accesses a database.
4. Optimise Videos & Images
Images and videos have a significant role in LCP.
Compressing all video and image files is recommended, and videos should generally take the place of GIFs.
Consider using a content delivery network or third-party hosting if your images or videos are enormous.
5. Use Lazy Loading
Using asynchronous loading, also known as lazy loading, to hasten your site’s first render is one technique to optimise the loading time of an image-heavy website.
6. Use A Content Delivery Network
It is advised to upload static assets to a content delivery network, including photos, videos, CSS, JavaScript, and others (CDN).
A CDN is a highly optimised network with servers located worldwide that hosts your files, speeds delivery, and lightens the burden on the server hosting your website.
7. Reduce Redirects
Redirects may exist on your website and are expected for a site’s development.
However, since they slow down your site, you should eliminate any redirect chains where one page reroutes to another that delivers.
8. Audit Your Plugins
If you’re using a well-known CMS, you have dozens of plugins loaded as usual.
All of these plugins should be reviewed, and a single plugin can replace those that are no longer needed, or that should be replaced.
9. Upgrade Your Hosting
If you’ve tried everything else and the performance of your page still doesn’t increase, you should consider upgrading your hosting.
Many servers will let you add more RAM and CPUs to help increase site speed if traffic is causing the server to hang. However, other hosts have slow, outdated systems.
Installing the PageSpeed Module on your server is possible if it runs an Apache or Nginx server. This module’s advantage is that it accelerates website performance at the server level without changing your site’s application.
Tips For Enhancing Page Speed
Mobile Friendliness
Your website must be mobile-friendly by 2022. There needs to be a justification for your website’s lack of a responsive design that will enhance user experience.
Next, you’ll accelerate mobile sites by implementing the performance above recommendations.
Finally, think about the following:
- Removing or cutting back on pop-ups.
- Create content for mobile devices that uses concise paragraphs.
Safe Browsing
You should already be providing two features of a website: safe and secure browsing. You ought to:
- Use HTTPS to run a secure website.
- Check the security of your website.
- Check all site uploads for dangerous code, malware, viruses, and other threats.
Regular observation is also crucial. If your website is compromised, Google will instantly flag it, discouraging many potential customers from visiting it.
Discreet interstitials
Although interruptions are never helpful for the user experience, they could be required to increase sales or gain email subscriptions. But you’ll want to try your hardest to:
- Fewer pop-ups
- Cut down on interstitials.
Due to the small screen sizes of mobile devices, a site’s abundance of pop-ups and interstitials may make it difficult or impossible for users to interact with the page, leading to a negative user experience.
Review Ad Networks
Another aspect of page experience impact must be considered if a site is showing adverts.
To show the advertising, ad networks will require you to add coding to your website; however, if the network is slow to load, this will result in noticeably slower page performance.
You ought to consider the following:
- Ad networks to assess their effects on the speed of your website.
- You have no control over any third-party plugins or other components on your website.
Your page experience will suffer if an ad network, script, or service harms site speed.
Conclusion
Page speed is a crucial component of optimization that is mainly within your control, even if it should be something other than your main point of concentration.
Your site’s speed and user experience should increase using Core Web Vitals as a guide, and you might also see a rise in your rankings.
