Optimising your website for Google, Bing and other search engines is a must nowadays, but how many people think about page speed.
Firstly, what is page speed or load speed as it is also called. In a nutshell, it’s the time the browser takes to receive the information about your website, from a server and display it to you.
Why is page speed so important?
If your website takes too long to load, you stand the chance of potential customers leaving and going to your competitor’s website. Anywhere between 1-3 seconds would be acceptable, but anything higher than this would be a big loss to your business. Site speed is also a very important part of your website for where it ranks in Google. Google has suggested that it uses page speed in their algorithm to rank pages. Another point to consider is Googlebot. Googlebot crawls your website to gather information from it to rank where your site will reside in the search engine index. If your website loads slowly, it will have impact on the allocated budget Googlebot has to crawl your website. This will have a negative effect on the pages Google will show in its search rankings.
So, what can you do to help with page speed.
Image compression
One of the biggest problems with slow websites is the file size of images. Using software like Photoshop or Gimp, which is free software can make short work of file compression.
Web Hosting
Where your website resides can play a big part on site load time. Sharing a server with other websites can slow your site down, especially at peak times. Using a dedicated server or a virtual private server (VPS) can make an improvement to your page speed.
WordPress
Having a website built with WordPress makes life a lot easier making your site faster. There is an abundance of plugins that can reduce image file size, browser caching etc.
