Site speed is a crucial factor for SEO, user experience, and conversions. But how do you know if your site is fast enough compared to your competitors and industry standards? In this article, we'll show you how to conduct a site speed SEO audit and use the insights to improve your site performance.
A site speed SEO audit is a process of measuring and analyzing your site's loading time, page size, and other metrics that affect how quickly your site loads on different devices and browsers. A site speed SEO audit can help you identify and fix issues that slow down your site, such as large images, unoptimized code, or server delays. A site speed SEO audit can also help you benchmark your site speed against your competitors and industry standards, such as Google's Core Web Vitals.
SEO site speed audits are absolutely vital in this day and age--end users aren't going to stay on a laggy or slow webpage. If your pages aren't loading properly, you're not just missing out on the potential for a conversion. You're also missing out on valuable data for your core audience. Anytime I run into a campaign with extraordinarily high bounce rates, the first thing I do is look at the site speed.
Site speed is important for SEO because it affects how users and search engines perceive your site. Users expect your site to load fast and smoothly, and if it doesn't, they may bounce, abandon, or switch to another site. Search engines, especially Google, also use site speed as a ranking factor, and they may penalize your site if it loads too slowly or has poor user experience. Site speed can also impact your site's crawlability, indexability, and visibility in search results.
The website loading speed can be the deciding factor in its success or failure. In fact, achieving a score of 95-100 on Google Web Vitals can significantly boost a website's ranking, moving it from the second page to the first page of search results.
To measure your site speed, you need to use tools that can capture and report various metrics and factors that affect your site's loading time. Some of the most popular and reliable tools are Google PageSpeed Insights, Google Lighthouse, GTmetrix, WebPageTest, and Pingdom. These tools can help you measure your site speed on different devices, browsers, locations, and network conditions. They can also provide you with scores, recommendations, and suggestions on how to improve your site speed.
To benchmark your site speed against competitors and industry standards, you need to compare your site's metrics and scores with those of other sites in your niche or market. You can use the same tools that you used to measure your site speed, or you can use tools that are specifically designed for competitive analysis, such as CrUX Dashboard, Speed Monitor, or SimilarWeb. These tools can help you see how your site stacks up against your competitors and industry averages, and where you need to improve or optimize.
To improve your site speed based on the audit results, you need to prioritize and implement the recommendations and suggestions that the tools provide you. Compressing and resizing images, minifying and combining CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files, using a content delivery network (CDN) to serve static resources, enabling caching and gzip compression on your server, removing or deferring unused or unnecessary scripts, plugins, or widgets, optimizing your database and queries, and upgrading your hosting plan or server are some of the most common and effective ways to do this.
To monitor and maintain your site speed, you need to regularly check and test your site's performance using the tools that you used for the audit. You also need to keep track of any changes or updates that you make to your site, such as adding new content, features, or functionality. You should also stay updated on the latest trends and best practices for site speed optimization, such as Google's Core Web Vitals and Web Vitals Report. By monitoring and maintaining your site speed, you can ensure that your site delivers a fast and positive user experience, and that it ranks well in search engines.