Is Page Speed Important?
Page Speed is important for SEO, so much so, that you should be willing to sacrifice the bells and whistles on your site to increase speed. It’s easy to create a heavy, great looking website than it is to create a clean, fast website. In the end, it’s all about user experience. Does the bouncing image add to the users experience if it sacrifices 1 second of load time?
Google started this in 2018 in case you were wondering why NOW you are losing rankings.
Don’t Waste Money
Here’s the part where I give you a tip on how not to waste money and give you some insight on how to diagnose the problem yourself.
2 tools will give you a great diagnosis of how your site is performing currently:
These 2 tools will give you EXACTLY what you need to do to increase page speed. Follow to a T and you’ll have a faster performing website. Now you know what needs to be done, you don’t need to waste money on a developer that will blow smoke. Here’s your list of action items.
What is a good speed score for SEO?
In Google PageSpeed Insights, you want to have a mobile score of 70+ and a desktop score of 90+. If you have say, an 8, please contact us immediately. Remember that with the introduction of Mobile-First Indexing, your entire site is being scored on your mobile score, so your desktop score is not important.
Mobile Speed for SEO
Here is the actual speed of this page that is utilizing AMP technology from Google to help serve up a fast mobile experience for customers. This allows you to read on mobile even with 2 bars of service without waiting for it to load. I’m sure you’ve been to (or not waited for) a page that takes forever to load. It’s annoying and Google knows it.
Page Speed Results
Here’s your list of action items. Google points out what is slowing down your site, how many seconds it wastes AND links on how to utilize best practices.
UNFORTUNATELY, most of these can only be fixed by a web developer. FORTUNATELY, you can contact us.
Tool #2 For Testing Page Speed
Google PageSpeed Insights is very critical of your site and like noted before, over a 70 on mobile is good. It’s important to also look at GTmetrix, which offers a slightly different perspective on your speed score. This program also outputs action items that you can use to show a developer what needs to be fixed to achieve a higher score. More importantly you can easily set a “I’d like to reach an A” as a milestone for a project and the a developer can give you what it would take to get there, but because all agencies are different, their approach might be different. Sometimes working on some high-impact, short-goal items may be enough to increase your page speed without doing a full site overhaul.
Actual SEO Results From A Page Speed Increase
Let’s take a look at John Taylor’s https://pairswithlife.net/. John reached out personally to help his Wine Podcast rank better in search engine results. After our initial audit, the page speed was the highest priority. Here’s a benchmark of what the website looked like before:
Results after website optimization
We reduced the first paint from 5.6 seconds to 1 second. If you’d like to learn more about the results and the story of John’s Wine Podcast take a look at our portfolio.
A company to increase your speed
Keep Blink Web Designs in mind when looking for a web developer or web development agency. For small business, Blink assigns one person to your account to keep costs low, exactly like hiring a freelancer. This way you’re not paying for an entire development team for small website fixes.
Do You Need a Quality SEO Firm?
Having an SEO Firm to help you with your rankings is a great ROI for the long term. Having and serving great content will bring in new traffic over months where a PPC campaign is one and done. Blink Web Designs is available for new customers with one-time, weekly, or monthly plans available.