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Site Speed: How & Why to Increase Your Website Speed for SEO

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When it comes to ways to improve your website’s performance, a lot of people immediately jump to the more well-known SEO staples such as content, meta data, and other on-page focused elements. But there is one major thing that often gets overlooked: Site speed.

Site speed is the measurement of how quickly your website loads, and how quickly it responds to the user’s inputs.

How speed improves SEO rankings

Starting in 2010, Google has been using site speed as one of the factors that they use when developing their rankings.

Since then, site speed has become an important part of online algorithms, which means if you want your website to be competitive, you must have good site speed.

 

Measuring your site speed

There are multiple ways that site speed can be measured or impacted, but they all add up to how quickly your site loads and responds.

Document Complete-based loading time: A site can be considered document complete when enough elements have loaded that users are able to enter text, or click buttons, regardless of if every single element is loaded.

Full render times: Another way of testing speed is how quickly it takes for your page to fully render.

Time to first byte: This measurement is the amount of time it takes for the browser to download the first byte from the online source.

 

How to improve your site speed

There are a lot of things you can do when it comes to improving the speed of your site. The following is a quick breakdown of some of the best methods:

Efficient Hosts: If you haven’t put a lot of thought into your host, you may want to. You may save some money with less efficient hosts, but you will suffer in site speed as a byproduct.

Limit images: High-definition images can really slow down load time for websites. Replacing high-def images with smaller ones can help your site load quicker.

Clean up plugins: There are a lot of quality plugins available through content managers like WordPress. However, too many plugins can slow down the load speed of your website.

This post was written by Kristian D’An. Kristian is the owner and SEO Specialist at Lux Digital Marketing, a st petersburg seo company. Kristian has been optimizing websites successfully for over 7 years. He has helped his clients achieve the #1 position on Google in several different industries.