Is site speed primordial for ranking?

byCalvinC

788 followers

6 years ago

Surveys reveal that more than 40% of peoples who are visiting a website expect the sites to load quickly and speed can largely impact your website doing well or crash.

Site Speed has always a problem that a lot of peoples who are creating a website or blog ignore particularly beginners.

The reason is we already have so much learning to do in order to get our website up and running, we all forget one of the most important factor: Speed.

Why should you care?

Google updates it search and ranking algorithm thousand of times every year, so probably Bing.

Have you heard about the new Google Speed Update that will be deployed on July 2018?
To make it short it will target mobile search, be prepared to optimize your website for mobile.

One main reason I would say is nobody likes something that is slow, you include right?

What is the right loading speed would you say?

Experts on the subject suggest under 3s, I mostly agree with what they said, but I consider 3s is a little exaggerate, perhaps 5s would be a better indicator.

There are some tricks you can use to avoid your visitors leaving your website for example:

• You can have a background color load before an image, visitors can see something is happening, so they will be less tempt to leave your website.
  
• Or having text next or on the top or below your image is a good idea as text load a lot faster than images.
  

Avoiding slow loading website

How can you avoid slow speed website?
Here are some solutions suggested by experts:

• Choose your theme carefully, a bad theme can load a ton of useless codes, because they were poorly written.
  
• Don't install too many plugins, 5 is a good number.
  
• Image optimization is of course one of the N1 solutions.
  
• Avoid using too many fancy stuffs like Fullwidth Sliders, Sliders, Animation, Carousel and so on... I know they're cool, I also like them few months ago, now I've just stopped using them. I even tried the Kenburnt effect, it's a full width image with a zooming effect, I found that so cool few months ago.
  
• If you want to have videos on your page or post, upload them to YouTube instead of having them on your website.
  

Some of you would probably think that a website like Amazon or Google has all these fancy stuffs and even more, their website are still performing so well.

Yes, you're right, but they have so many resources and we're Alone.

Website Speed Checking

You can use these 3 tools to check if your website behave like a Ferrari or more like a snail.

1. Google own speed test tool PageSpeed Insights
   
2. Lighthouse also from Google
   
3. Pingdom
   

These tools will also give you a diagnostic of the health of your website and will point out the problems you encounter with you website and how to fix them.

This summer when you're having a cocktail on a beach, perhaps you can give yourself a little of your time to do some researches about Site Speed.

Your website may feel refresh and perhaps even thank you.

Good Optimizations.

And yes don't forget the Mobile version of your website, more than 60% of peoples are visiting your website on a smartphone.

Calvin