Is Page Speed a Ranking Factor for SEO

Why Is Page Speed A Ranking Factor For SEO Market? 

Table of Content

Many of you often think, how is page speed a ranking factor for SEO? When visitors open a website, it annoys them due to its low loading speed. They rarely wait and mostly go back to other websites. It will increase the website’s bounce rate.

Optimizing the webpage is as essential as developing the page. If your website has less loading speed, it wastes time and money because it takes too much time to display the results. Moreover, search engines like Google consider page speed a ranking factor.

Evidence for Considering the Page Speed a Ranking Factor

Google highly favors page loading speed in increasing the website’s visibility. The visitors become frustrated when they wait for the page to load. In most cases, they leave the page rather than waiting and visit the page that loads faster and gives results immediately.

The bigger your website, the more you need to optimize your website. It will take more time for Google to crawl the web pages. If your website is optimized correctly, Google will easily crawl it and rank it high in the search engines. It will ultimately impact the conversion rate and users experience. 

Page Speed and SEO

If you want to see your brand on the top of search engines, you should focus on improving the web page speed. If you think page speed is a ranking factor for SEO, then you are thinking correctly. To rank your web pages high in search results, your website should compete for a maximum of 10 organic pages in the search results.

Pages that perform well and have good loading speed will get more customer traffic and overall website success. It has been observed that the pages that load faster when a user clicks the website have high loading speeds and are preferred by Google. So, Google increases its visibility n search engines. 

Factors Affecting the Page Speed

Many factors still affect web page speed when you build a quality website and optimize it. You already know those factors to some extent, but we are again wrapping them up for your convenience. Focus on those factors and improve your website if it has less loading speed. 

Hosting service

Hosting services are the factors that decide where your website will land and become live. So the performance of a server impacts the performance of the website. Choosing the accurate and quality server will work fast to complete your activities. Some factors also influence the web server: server configuration, uptime, and specifications of machines. 

Website theme 

From layouts to web page font and color scheme, you, the website theme, handle all your website design. Some themes have small file sizes and load faster than websites with heavy and oversized themes. 

Large file size

While running a website, we discuss many files like HTML and CSS. These files are kilobytes and bytes in size. When the files are large enough, they will impact the website speed, and the website will take time to load. Especially if you are visiting the website on your mobile phone, it will make it clunky and difficult to load. 

Images and videos

Heavy images impact the website’s loading speed. If these images are optimized, your website will have a higher LCP score because your pictures will load very slowly, which is time-consuming. 

Too many plugins and widgets

When you use WordPress to run your website, you install many plugins and widgets to add multiple functionalities to your website. These plugins often make your website so powerful, but using too many plugins may reduce the ranking of your page.

Absence of CDN

A CDN controls the static content of your websites, like CSS and image files. The CDN is a content delivery network that helps the page to load and quickly serves these files to the people close to the server. 

What’s the Difference Between Page and Website Speed?

Most users think that page and website speed is the same. These terms look similar but don’t have the same meaning. Page speed refers to the speed of a single page, while web speed refers to the speed of the whole website.

You can measure the speed of a single page more quickly than the whole website, as it contains many pages. Measuring the entire website’s performance takes much time as it is tricky to check the billions of pages of a website.

If your website is optimized, but some of its pages need to be optimized, it will only affect the ranking of that specific page. But if the whole website needs to be optimized, it will affect all its pages. 

How Important Is Page Speed for SEO?

Page loading speed is crucial in improving your website page rankings in the search engine. If you have implemented all the SEO techniques, then it’s time to increase the loading speed of your website. Visitors love to visit web pages with fast loading speeds and give quick results to the viewers.

If you have put quality content on your web page, it will be valuable if your web page loads faster. Google will also be unable to crawl the page. Your users will turn back to your competitors, and you will lose brand credibility and loyalty with each bounce rate. It will ultimately lead to less revenue and less income for your brand. 

How Can You Diagnose the Page Speed?

From the exclusive content, you have learned that page speed is essential for SEO ranking. If you have optimized your page but need to know its loading speed, you can use multiple ways to check it out.

  • You can use online tools to check the loading speed of your web page by simply inserting the URL of your website.  
  • You will know how quickly your website is loading and giving you the results. 
  • The final report that you will get includes the analysis of your website. 
  • The information will let you know what’s going well on your web page and what you need to improve. 

How to Improve Page Speed for Higher Rankings

Once you get what is going on with your website page and what’s reducing its speed, you need to improve it to keep your website high in search engines. If there is any issue in a specific website area, you need to manage that, too, as it may also reduce the ranking of your website.

  • Your web page code plays a crucial role in page optimization; you need to optimize the code first to improve page ranking. 
  • Compress your file size to load it quickly. 
  • If your image size is too large, reduce it to load your web page faster. 

Conclusion

Is page speed a ranking factor for SEO? The best answer to this query is when you optimize your web page speed to rank it high in the search engine. Google will crawl your website and makes it accessible to visitors.

When your page loads fast and has all that your users are looking for. The visitors will stay on your website for extended periods, and you will get more customer traffic. Ultimately, you will get higher search rankings and more revenue.