How Google Page Speed Insight scores impact SEO

How Google Page Speed Insight scores impact on SEO, and what that means for businesses.

We’ve all heard the term “page speed” in relation to SEO, but how much do we actually know about what it means? What does page speed have to do with users’ experience on your site? Is it an important factor when ranking content on Google? Well, we’ve got the answers to these questions right here. If you are a business who has a website, then what’s below is well worth a read.

What is page speed and how does it determine user experience?

Page speed is a term used to describe how quickly a web page loads. It’s typically measured in seconds or fractions of a second.

Page speed is a significant factor in the overall user experience of a website. How fast a site appears affects how much users like it, and influences their perception of the quality of the content on that site. Fast sites are perceived as more engaging. It also impacts search rankings with Google favouring fast-loading pages in its search results.

The average internet user has a short attention span. They don’t want to wait for your site to load. And they certainly may want to leave your page because of poor content or slow loading times. Therefore, the speed of your website/page is crucial. If you want your target audience to be able to access your website to be informed about your products and services, your webpage needs to load and operate really fast.

In fact, research has shown that slow page load times can decrease conversions by 7%. Over 50% of internet users expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.

Even though the above facts are already clear enough, there are still many companies that have yet to optimise their pages for better performance.

Does page speed affect content ranking on Google?

Google has even started factoring in speed into its search results – the faster the website, the higher it ranks on search results. What does this mean for you? If you aren’t optimising your websites’ speed, you’re losing money… big time!

How do you determine page speed? 

Page speed is a very important factor of SEO. If you are looking for SEO advice, make sure your host company can provide fast page loading times. There are many variables that affect your site’s performance, but the hosting service plays a vital role for overall website speed.

The main factors affecting website load time are server configuration, page files and script files. The most effective method to check how fast your pages are loading is by using Google Page Speed Insights Tool.

What is Google Page speed Insights?

Google’s Page Speed Insights is a tool to test Web page performance. It provides suggestions on how to improve the page speed based on content analysis, resource optimisation, and browser caching techniques. It also gives scores for mobile-friendliness of the web pages. High scores are required by Google in order to rank high in its search engine results pages (SERP).

Google Page Speed insight scores are important because page speed can impact how users perceive your website. If you want to keep them on your site, it’s important to optimise for speed. Google provides a free tool that lets you know how fast your page loads in comparison to other sites. The tool will tell you the perceived load time of your web pages, as well as how long it takes to fully load all resources (including images).

The impacts of Google Page Speed insights scores on SEO

Google Page Speed score is an important factor in SEO rankings. If your site load time is slow, it can negatively affect the overall user experience and theoretically has a negative impact on search engine rankings.

In order to measure the speed of your website/webpage all you need to do is enter the URL of your webpage on the Google Page Speed Insight page and click on the ‘Analyse’ button. You will then receive a comprehensive report based on the following criteria:

• Time to above-the-fold load. This suggests how long it takes for content to appear on a page above the fold after a user clicks to access a new page.
• Time to full-page load. Indicates the time taken to fully load a page upon request by a user.

Scores are measured from 0-100. Scores above 85 indicate that a webpage is functioning well. These scores are vital as it determines the level of SEO of your webpage, since Google’s ranking algorithms are inclusive of page speed. If your Google Page Speed score is unsatisfactory the tool suggests possible measures to correct the page speed. It is important that you consider taking these steps in order to increase SEO levels.

Conclusion

By now, it’s no secret that Google Page Speed Insights is an important metric for search engine optimisation. It can impact your rankings and even affect your business in a big way.

• How does Google Page Speed Insight scores affect SEO?

Google penalises slow loading webpages by ranking them far below the top. This means when a user types in a search query related to your webpage, he may not even see your web page in the first page of search engine results. Whereas if your Google Page Speed Score is above 85 you’re most likely to be ranked higher in Google Search results.

• How does Google Page Speed Insight scores affect you as a business?

Well if your page is not going to be easily accessible because of Google’s ranking or users may not want to waste time by visiting a slow webpage it means you are losing potential customers thereby leading to losses and a decrease in the value of your company.

The good news is that there are ways to improve your Google Page Speed Insight scores so that you can rank higher and maintain SEO levels as well as perform better as a company due to an efficient website with fast loading speed. Here are some of the ways to improve Google Page Speed Insight scores:

• Use compression tools such as Riot to fix your image size as large images can cause slow loading.
• Implement the use of browser caching tools.
• Use AMP to make your webpage load faster on mobile devices.
• Minimise HTML coding space using tools such as HTML Minify.

Now that we’ve given you an insight to Google Page Speed Insight scores and it’s impact on SEO and your business, you could definitely consider taking the test and resolving speed issues so that you have a fast loading webpage that is efficient in terms of SEO and thereby leading to an increase in organic traffic towards your website and eventually an increase in sales and the value of your company.