Page Speed Optimization Services to Improve Your Site

We’ve all experienced slow web pages. You click on something from a search engine results page, and nothing happens. You can see your browser working, but it takes a full five seconds or longer to get to the page you want. In fact, most users would probably navigate to a different result after waiting for just three seconds.

This is a real-world example of how slow page speed can affect your website.

Why Is Page Speed Important?

It wasn’t that long ago that connecting to the Internet was a slow, drawn-out process. Today, however, online access is virtually instantaneous and omnipresent. Web users are accustomed to having whatever information they need at their fingertips the moment they need it. In fact, while the average website takes approximately 22 seconds to load, studies show that 53% of users will abandon a page if it takes more than 3.

Web users aren’t the only ones who value technical SEO elements such as page speed optimization. How long a site takes to load is just one of many factors that search engines such as Google use when determining page rankings.

Additionally, a slow web page can affect other ranking factors such as bounce rate and dwell time, creating a vicious cycle that results in your site falling further and further down those rankings.

That’s where a digital marketing agency such as LSEO can help. There are countless elements of a web page that can slow your site to a crawl, from hosting issues to poor image compression. It can be hard even to know where to start.

Fortunately, LSEO’s web development team knows what to look for and how to fix it, and they stay up to date with the best SEO strategies to help your online business run faster and smoother than ever.

How Much Does Page Speed Affect SEO?

Page speed is a known SEO ranking factor in Google’s eyes. Plenty of other elements affect a web page’s SEO authority, but page speed is one of the big ones.

The question is to what extent speed plays into SEO.

Think about it this way. Google has determined that most users will leave a site if it takes three or more seconds to load. People have specific reasons for visiting websites, and they want to be served what they came for with lightning speed.

Websites that fail to provide this create bad user experiences, and Google tends to penalize sites that don’t serve users well.

It is not the case that a slow page automatically gets dropped from Google’s rankings; plenty of other website components (optimized content, technical SEO, domain security) factor into a page’s SEO strength. But slow page speed does hurt your site and could be the difference between gaining and losing new customers.

What Is a Good Google Page Speed Score?

You can easily run a page speed analysis of your website by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. When you input your URL, the tool will give you a number rating from 0 to 100.

The tool divides page speed scores into three quality levels, with 0 to 49 being poor, 50 to 89 being good, and 90 to 100 being optimal.

The tool also suggests ways to improve your page speed score if yours is lower than you want it. It might tell you to optimize your images or remove unused JavaScript to cut this or that number of seconds from your load time.

Obviously, you want your web pages to load as fast as possible at all times. But there are sometimes issues beyond your direct control that can slow you down, such as your website hosting. If it just can’t handle more speed, it isn’t going to happen.

As we said above, page speed is only one SEO factor. You can be outranked by a website with a lower page speed score. The important point to remember, though, is that you should always attempt to get your website to load as fast as it can. It will only help you.

How to Speed Up Web Page Loading Time

Clean up your content

As with anything SEO-related, a web page’s content is possibly the most important thing to get right. It’s not just about what you say, but how you say it. Using too many images, videos, or audio files, for instance, can drag down your speed, especially when they’re not compressed correctly. Similarly, HTTP requests, DOM elements, redirects, iframes, and DNS lookups are all common site elements all too easy to overuse. A clean, streamlined web page with strong SEO content is going to be a fast, user-friendly page.

Flip the script

Whatever combination of HTML, Javascript, and CSS your website uses, making sure your code is as optimized as possible, and that all your scripts play nicely with one another, isn’t always easy. One wrong keystroke can be the equivalent of putting cement shoes on a marathon runner. There are a number of ways a good designer can simplify a page’s code, from making Java and CSS external and eliminating render-blocking to removing duplicate scripts and minimizing DOM access.

Bake smaller cookies

Optimizing page speed might well be the only time in life when it’s better to have smaller cookies rather than larger ones. Web cookies are small bundles of data that a page stores on a user’s hard drive to save certain information for future access. One example would be personal data a user might fill in on an online order form. Some cookies collect larger chunks of data and save them for a longer period of time. In any case, the larger the cookie, the slower the web page.

Service your server

Alongside the content of your website, no factor impacts page speed more than your host and your server. Being that physical computers store your site’s data and allow that data to be retrieved, it’s impossible to have a smooth-running web page without a smooth-running host and server. Sometimes that means upgrading to a better-quality host and server. Other times, it means reorganizing your database or utilizing a content delivery network. Whatever it takes, ensuring your site is as fast as it can be is worth the effort.

Why Let LSEO Speed Up Your Website?

LSEO’s page speed optimization services are second to none and can get your website rolling with much-improved speed for your users.

But why choose us over someone else to speed up your site?

Expertise

We have the industry knowledge to get the job done correctly and send your website on its way to faster speeds. Our web development team is made up of dedicated experts who know page speed inside out.

Fast Load Times

The results of our work speak for themselves. Your web pages will enjoy faster load times and give users what they want in less time, which will go a long way toward showing Google you are worthy of getting ranked.

Google Approved

Strong user experiences are among the most important elements that tell Google whether it should rank certain web pages highly. Our page speed methods satisfy this “user experience” factor that’s part of Google’s Core Web Vitals.

Greater Engagement

Our page speed optimization work will create an environment for greater user engagement with your website. No longer will excessive load times scare off the audiences you want to attract. We’ll get your pages running fast so more people can find what you’re producing.