Site speed has recently become another ranking factor to keep in mind as you are maintaining or continually improving your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). On July, 9th Google announced site speed as the latest influence to their ranking algorithm. They confirmed they will me monitoring site speed to ensure their first page results are the best choices for the users. As we’ve experienced the frustration of endless load times and find ourselves moving on to the next, Google picked up on the importance of a website that loads and operates as expected.
Proper analysis of your site would assess any underlying issues. There are multiple elements that affect your sites load time that you should review.
- Limited hosting platform
- Needed maintenance and updates that are being neglected
- Too many plugins installed
- Large images and videos in your media files
- Content overload
- Unnecessary functions and features
Wordtracker.com shared Google tools you can utilize to help you improve your page speeds.
Test My Site is a simple to use mobile speed testing tool which gives a general rating and an estimated percentage visitor loss figure due to loading speed.
The Page Speed Insights tool will test your mobile and desktop speeds and give suggestions for how to improve. See the Wordtracker case study on how we improved our speeds using this tool.
Google also refers users to their Lighthouse tool and the Chrome User Experience Report to analyze a page’s performance.