PageSpeed for SEO: To Do or Not to Do, It’s a Question

We Need to Do PageSpeed to Help SEO?

What is Page Speed?

Before we discuss that to what degree page speed can actually help SEO, let’s clarify one thing: PageSpeed is not site speed. PageSpeed refers to a sample of page views on a site. PageSpeed can be described, according to Moz.com, in either “page load time” (the time it takes to fully display the content on a specific page) or “time to first byte” (how long it takes for your browser to receive the first byte of information from the web server). 

Multiple views on PageSpeed

The mainstream opinion on if businesses should run PageSpeed is positive, but, there’s a few doubts being mentioned as well. Cansoft (Vancouver) today will show you both sides, let’s see if the pros weights more than cons.

A Faster page is better user experience:

When you try to open a website, do you want its page to load like a turtle? The user experience your website offers determines whether a visitor stays to explore or bounces back to the results. According to Maile Ohye from Google, “2 seconds is the threshold for ecommerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second.”

Another reason page speed needs to be done is that Google is starting to make their index mobile-first.

They intend to include page loading times on mobile device as one of the ranking factors:

          QUOTE: “How fast your website loads is critical but often a completely ignored element in any online business and that includes search marketing and search engine optimization. And that includes page load times on mobile devices: The average time it takes to fully load a mobile landing page is 22 seconds, according to a new analysis. Yet 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load. That’s a big problem.” Google

We can see that mobile experience is getting more important than ever.

Slow page speed affects crawl budget.

Google might crawl your site slower if you have a slow site, that’s really bad – especially if you are adding lots of new content or making lots of edits to content on the site. If you want your website pages to show up in search engines, they have to be crawled first so they can then be indexed.

Page speed matters to your users, which means it matters to search engines.

According to the source in March 2018, Google made it clear that page speed matters and mobile-friendliness are most important. Page speed should be an important consideration when you’re building, maintaining, and improving your websites. In the beginning of 2018, Pingdom offered us some new insight on how load time affects bounce rate: the more time your site needs to load; the higher the bounce rate gets.

How can you improve page speed?

Enable compression

You can use Gzip (which is a software application for file compression) to reduce the size of your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files that are larger than 150 bytes. When comes to image files, you should compress them in programs like Photoshop where you can retain control over the quality of the image.

Remove render-blocking JavaScript

According to Google’s Insights, you should avoid or minimize the use of blocking JavaScript, especially external scripts that must be fetched before they can be executed. “Scripts that are necessary to render page content can be inlined to avoid extra network requests, however the inlined content needs to be small and must execute quickly to deliver good performance.”

Except the above methods, there are some more major things you can do to improve your page speed.

If you want to learn or engage more, feel free to contact Cansoft (Vancouver) today. We offer you the best SEO services with reasonable price.

Some possible risks:

For example, about “minify JavaScript”: removing all the white space from any JavaScript used on your website might break the functionality of your site. Because minifying JavaScript can sometimes lead to it not functioning properly or causing errors. More extended reading, visit “The problems with Google PageSpeed Insights”. You can compare the pros and cons, and then decide what to do depends on your unique situation. But if you are not sure how to do or what to do, email or call Cansoft, we do our best to help you and your business. In general, PageSpeed is helpful, you should consider to do it.