Page speed is how long it takes for a web page to load, meaning the time until all the main content shows up on the screen. It’s an important ranking factor for search engines and it has a direct effect on how well your site does. A slow page drags down the performance of your whole website.
Why does fast loading matter?
For a business, a website works like a digital storefront. If you don’t win people over in the first few seconds, it’s hard to win them back later. A slow site hurts the whole customer journey. Page speed has a direct impact on these three things.
- SEO. Loading speed affects where your site shows up in search results, so speed and SEO go hand in hand.
- User experience. People clearly prefer pages that load fast. One way to see how happy visitors are is your bounce rate, and that in turn affects your SEO.
- Conversion rate. Speed and conversions are closely tied. When parts of a page load too slowly, people are less likely to take you up on your offer.
All of this plays into how well you rank. Fast pages let Google’s bots read your content more quickly, which is why Google treats page speed as a ranking factor. More and more searches happen on phones, and people on the go have very little patience, so Google pays extra attention to mobile loading times.
Put simply, page speed is your first impression. If that first moment is ruined by a slow load, people bounce fast.
What’s a good page speed?
There’s no one size fits all answer, because people feel speed differently. Someone rushing to buy a concert ticket expects a much faster page than someone casually browsing an online store to kill time.
What’s clear is that average loading times keep getting shorter every year. Back in 2018 the average page took 3.21 seconds to load. Today people expect pages to load in under three seconds, and Google recommends aiming for under two.
5 tips for a faster website
Here are a few simple ways to speed up your pages.
- Use images in the right size. Shrinking your images is one of the easiest wins. Photo editing programs like Adobe Photoshop make it simple with the Save for Web option, which picks a web friendly size for you.
- Consider a dedicated server. Most websites run on shared hosting, where your site sits on one machine with around a hundred other sites. A dedicated server runs only your website, so you’re not sharing power with a hundred other customers. That can make your pages load a lot faster. Most hosting companies offer dedicated servers.
- Turn on Gzip compression. Gzip shrinks the files your server sends to browsers like Chrome or Firefox, often by a lot. It’s usually on by default, and you can check it with a free Gzip compression test.
- Avoid bad requests. When a browser opens a page, it asks the server for all the files it needs. If a file can’t be found, it sets off a chain reaction that wastes time. Fixing broken files and file paths takes care of this.
- Use browser caching. Browsers can save content that gets loaded often, so it doesn’t have to be downloaded again every time. This makes a big difference for people who visit several pages in one session, like when they’re shopping online, because each new page loads faster. Depending on your website platform, you can turn caching on with a plugin or extension.
Still slow? Clean up your database
If those steps don’t help, take a look at your database. If you use a platform like WordPress, your database can get pretty big. It stores everything from settings and landing pages to blog posts and user profiles.
It also collects a lot of stuff your website doesn’t need. When that junk piles up, it can slow your site down. Clear these out on a regular basis.
- old post and page revisions
- spam comments
- unused metadata, tags and categories
Always make a backup of your website before you touch the database, just to be safe.
How to measure page speed with Google PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool that checks how fast your site loads and tells you why it might be slow. It also gives you tips for speeding things up.
The tool looks at your page’s Core Web Vitals and gives you scores for performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO. Just type the address of the page you want to test into the search bar.
You’ll get a performance score out of 100. If your score is low, the recommendations section shows you what to fix.
You’ll see technical suggestions along with how many seconds each fix could save. That way you can tell right away which changes will make the biggest difference. Don’t just apply every recommendation blindly though. Check first whether a change could cause problems somewhere else on your site.
Your site doesn’t need a perfect 100 to be fast. A score of around 85 can be plenty. Simply following the tool’s recommendations usually makes a big difference.
PageSpeed Insights vs. Lighthouse
Google offers two free tools for measuring and improving speed, PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse. Lighthouse uses test data from a simulated environment instead of real visitor data. It checks your site’s performance and whether you’re following Google’s recommended best practices.
PageSpeed Insights focuses on speed and uses a mix of test data and real user data. Both tools are useful for making your website faster.
Other tools you can try
Besides PageSpeed Insights, tools like WebPageTest and Pingdom also check how fast a page loads based on its address. There are also free website graders that look at speed along with SEO and security.
Each tool looks at slightly different things that can affect speed. To get the full picture, it’s worth trying more than one.
Bottom line, a faster site means more traffic
Page speed matters for search rankings, and it matters just as much for the people using your site. Everyone wants pages to load fast, especially on their phones. Check your site’s speed on a regular basis, and use these tools to find out exactly what to fix.