If you own a business website, you probably want it to be fast, user-friendly and optimized for conversions. But did you know that your website’s speed also affects your ranking on Google and other search engines? That’s right, Google PageSpeed scores are one of the factors that determine how well your website performs on organic search results.
Google PageSpeed scores are a measure of how fast your website loads on different devices and browsers. They range from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating better performance.
What makes up a Google PageSpeed score?
- First contentful paint: The time it takes for the first element of your page to render on the screen.
- First meaningful paint: The time it takes for the main content of your page to render on the screen.
- Time to interactive: The time it takes for your page to become fully interactive and responsive to user input.
- Speed index: The average time it takes for all elements of your page to be visible on the screen.
- First CPU idle: The time it takes for your page’s main thread to become idle and ready for more tasks.
Why a slow site can keep you from reaching your full potential
- User experience: Faster websites provide a better user experience, which leads to higher engagement, retention and conversion rates. Users tend to abandon websites that take too long to load or respond poorly to their actions. According to Google, 53% of mobile users leave a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. A slow-loading website can be frustrating for users, leading to a higher bounce rate and decreased engagement. This can ultimately result in fewer sales and conversions for the business.
- SEO ranking: Faster websites also rank higher on Google and other search engines, which means more organic traffic and visibility for your business. Google considers PageSpeed scores as one of its ranking signals since 2010, now uses Core Web Vitals (a set of metrics related to PageSpeed). A slow-loading site is more likely to rank lower, resulting in less organic traffic.
- Competitive edge: Faster websites give you an advantage over your competitors who may have slower or less optimized websites. You can attract more customers and generate more revenue by offering them a superior online experience.
- Decreased ad performance: As with improved ad performance, a slower-loading website means that ads are less likely to be viewed, resulting in a lower return on investment for businesses.
- Increased cost of operation: A slower website requires more resources to load, which can result in increased hosting costs or reduced efficiency for businesses with high traffic volumes.
- Negative impact on brand reputation: A slow-loading website can give the impression of a poorly-managed or outdated business, damaging the reputation of the brand.
Boosting your Google PageSpeed score benefits
- Improved user experience: Websites that load faster are more enjoyable to use and are more likely to keep visitors on the site for longer periods of time. This can lead to higher conversion rates and ultimately, more sales.
- Better search engine rankings: Google takes site speed into account when ranking websites in its search results. This means that a faster site is more likely to rank higher and receive more organic traffic.
- Increased mobile device performance: With the proliferation of mobile devices, it’s important for websites to load quickly on these devices. A slow-loading site can lead to a frustrating user experience, leading to a higher bounce rate.
- Reduced bounce rate: A high bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave a site after only viewing one page) can negatively impact a business’s search engine rankings. A fast-loading website is more likely to keep visitors on the site, reducing the bounce rate.
- Reduced cost of operation: A faster website requires fewer resources to load, which can result in cost savings for businesses that pay for hosting or have high traffic volumes.
- Improved ad performance: Advertisers often pay based on the number of impressions their ads receive. A faster-loading website means that ads are more likely to be viewed, resulting in a higher return on investment for businesses.
Ways to Improve Your Speed
- Use a reliable web hosting service: Your web hosting service plays a crucial role in determining how fast your website loads. Choose a web hosting service that offers high performance, security and scalability for your business needs. Avoid shared hosting plans that may slow down your website due to overcrowding or limited resources. Tunnel Vision Design will set your new site up on one of the fastest cloud hosting providers in the world–our competitors choose services based on what costs them the least, not what is the best fit for your business.
- Optimize images and videos: Images and videos are often the largest elements on your website, which can significantly increase its loading time. Optimize them by reducing their file size, compressing them, using responsive formats (such as WebP) and lazy loading them (only loading them when they are visible on the screen).
- Minify CSS, JavaScript and HTML files: CSS, JavaScript and HTML files are the code that makes up your website’s structure, functionality and appearance. Minifying them means removing any unnecessary characters (such as spaces, comments or line breaks) that do not affect their functionality but add extra bytes. This can reduce their file size and improve their loading speed.
- Enable caching: Caching is a technique that allows browsers to store copies of frequently accessed resources (such as images or scripts) locally on their devices. This reduces the number of requests sent to the server and speeds up subsequent page loads. You can enable caching by using plugins or tools that generate cache headers or files for your website.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN): A CDN is a network of servers distributed across different locations that deliver content faster by serving it from the closest server to the user’s location. This reduces latency (the delay between sending a request and receiving a response) and improves performance. You can use a CDN service such as Cloudflare, Digital Ocean, or Amazon CloudFront for your website.
- Minimize HTTP requests: Every time a browser requests a file (such as an image or CSS file) from a server, it adds to the load time of the website. Reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining files or using caching.
- Enable compression: Use Gzip compression to reduce the size of your website’s files, resulting in faster loading times.
These are some of the ways you can improve your Google PageSpeed scores and make your business website faster, but even better than spending months to years learning how to optimize your website is spending the next 15 minutes to let the eggheads at Tunnel Vision Design do it instead. By doing so, you can enhance user experience, SEO ranking and competitive edge of your new or redesigned website. So if you need help with optimizing your website’s speed or designing a fast and responsive website for your business, you can contact us at Tunnel Vision Design and set up a free consultation. We are experts in web design and development, and we will help you create a stunning and high-performing website. Don’t just take our word for it, here is a typical Tunnel Vision Design client website:
Don’t trust any company that says that will promise 100s for every metric, depending on the individual goals and design vision for the specific site it may be preferable to decide on compromises which may slightly lower those scores. Dynamic, e-commerce, and multimedia sites in particular can have priorities that take precedence over pure speed, however, when you choose Tunnel Vision Design we’ll always craft your website to be the site of your dreams. There’s a reason we are known across the industry for our unique hassle-free maintenance plans which take all the headaches out of web hosting.
