The Importance of Fast Loading for SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, is essential for anyone who wants brand recognition and increased consumer traffic. The purpose of SEO is to increase your ranking on search engines, which makes your website visible to as many people as possible. Considering that over 90% of site traffic comes from Google searches, it’s essential that your site ranks well.

There are several digital marketing tactics to increase your WordPress site performance, such as incorporating keywords, producing high-quality content (or stylesheets) and creating an engaging website layout. However, no matter how beautiful or compelling your website is, no page will survive technical bugs.

Over 50% of mobile users will exit a web page that has a loading speed of over three seconds. While that may seem like a short timeframe, the advancement of technology has gotten people used to speed and convenience. Ultimately, slow websites negatively impact user experience, which translates to a higher bounce rate and a lower search engine ranking across the entire site. It also negatively impacts your reputation; if you can’t offer quality website functionality, how can people trust the quality of your products or services?

A slow website also impacts your SEO. The longer the site loading speed of your website, the lower your ranking factor. WordPress page speed optimization has become more important than ever. A faster site can directly increase both organic traffic and conversion rates.

Working the Algorithm

Currently, Google’s algorithm is mobile-based, meaning Google relies on mobile statistics for indexing and ranking. Thus, your website speed across smartphones and mobile devices impact your ranking. Page load time has been a factor in SEO since 2010, and it became an even bigger one in 2018 when the algorithm underwent a “speed update” that increased the importance of loading time.

As of August 2021, page speed will become an even more important part of Google’s algorithm via the Core Web Vitals update. This new update will be based on three main factors:

• The loading time of the hosting provider
• The amount of time spent on the webserver
• The visual stability of the website (such as the quality of pixels and image files)

As the new update takes place, any website that hopes to succeed needs to adapt. Most web owners should be asking themselves, “How do I increase my site speed?”

A good WordPress hosting service is important for your website performance. It is best to choose the one that will best work for you. Shared hosting service providers takes the extra step to optimize your website. However, it may tend to provide a poorer performance because you share the server resources with many other customers or websites. You won’t be able to tell how much resources other customers are using.

Managed WordPress Hosting service provides you with the most optimized server configurations to run WordPress.

No website owner wants a low conversion rate that doesn’t offer a return. Some case study that every second delay can cause a loss in conversion, fewer page views, and a decrease in customer satisfaction.

Fortunately, there are methods to help increase your site speed. Below are some of the options you can check that can help your website.

A great way to reduce your page load time is to optimize your images and image size. Large images and files will take longer to load, which negatively affects the experience of the user. Optimization involves compressing, or minimizing, the size of your HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. When doing this, it’s important not to compromise the image quality; some programs like gzip let you decrease your file size but don’t consider the way the final product will look.

You can also clean up your WordPress database. Your database will start to accumulate unnecessary data over time. This clutter can affect your WordPress site speed. Deleting unwanted data will help your database keep its size to a minimum.

Remove unused plugins and themes. Since the plugins and themes need to be up to date, unused ones can pose a security vulnerability and they can also affect a WordPress site’s performance. Deleting unused ones is the correct step to speed up your website.

Another option is lazy load images. Lazy loading is an earlier technique to speed up WordPress, where the images are loaded as the user scrolls down the web page. This is to avoid putting stress to the web server which will prevent slower load times. Since you are not loading all the elements of the web page all at once, this will help reduce the burden on your server resources.

WP SitePlan is a U.S.-based WordPress website maintenance and support service that offers a team of experts who will manage, protect and enhance the quality of your site. In addition to optimizing your page speed through proven methods such as image compression, minification and browser caching, our team will also provide:

For websites that want a higher level of personalized service, we offer a support plan (which includes desk and WooCommerce support) and a Support Pro plan (which comes with unlimited desk help, complete malware removal and daily performance and speed checks).

Once you’ve signed up for an account, our team will conduct a backup, analyze your metrics and update your site as needed. By applying our knowledge of SEO and website optimization, we can ensure your site aligns with any forthcoming updates to the Google algorithm — and if it doesn’t, we’ll execute the necessary changes.