With Google and other search engines increasingly using page speed as a signal in their page ranking algorithms, online businesses have ever more reason to make their websites as fast as possible in order to maximize their SEO. Multiple studies confirm page speed can directly affect a business’ site traffic and revenue, with even a millisecond leading to big differences in a site’s performance. As with all things SEO, Coalition works from a large body of knowledge on page speed, and today we’ll be going over some of the basics of maximizing your site’s performance for better search ranking.
Optimize Your Images
Large images are one of the most common culprits of page slowdown. Considering images often make up the lion’s share of a site’s content, this can lead to serious impediments to page speed. Compressing your images is crucial to keeping load times down and maximizing your page ranking. There are a variety of tools at your disposal to optimize your images, but key points include carefully choosing image file types and measuring necessary level of quality against file size before compression.
Cache Your Resources
Caching your site’s static content in a separate location such as a content delivery system (CDN) can significantly improve page speed for your website. Fetching content directly over the network can take time, slowing down your site, and can incur large data costs for your visitor. As such, caching of previously used content is crucial. Google provides a helpful checklist for maximizing your page speed gains via cache.
Minimize Redirects
The number of “hops” a browser has to make to reach your website invariably slows down, with each redirect generating another HTTP request-response. Think of a direct flight across the country as opposed to a series of layovers. Each layover doesn’t just increase time in the air, but time in between flights further compounds the problem. The same can be said for page speed. Minimizing redirects provides your users with a “direct flight” to your content.
Get Minified
If you’ve never heard the word “minification” before, don’t worry. Minification refers to the removal of line breaks, spaces, and abbreviations in code resources like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This removing of redundant data reduces the size of source code, making its transfer across networks (e.g., to a browser) more efficient. There are a variety of minification resources available for each, including HTMLMinifier, CSSNano, and UglifyJS. Like other space-saving techniques this can help reduce drag on your website and improve page speed.
Measure Your Success
While these key points are still just scratching the surface on maximizing your page speed for SEO, perhaps the most important thing to do is to test and monitor your speed. Google PageSpeed Insights assesses your site’s configuration and score it for page speed optimization. We also recommend Lighthouse, available in Chrome Dev Tools. Lighthouse can provide specific recommendations from right in your browser. We also recommend frequently testing your site speed. You can find one useful tool for such, from Google, here.
Speed Up with Coalition
If you are considering whether or not SEO and digital marketing are right for your needs, we’d be happy to talk with you today and start developing your strategy. Our expertise in this industry is something we are proud to share and use to empower users and online businesses alike. If you’d like to see what a professional SEO agency can do to optimize your business’ performance, please give us a call at (310) 827-3890 or email us at sales@localhost. We offer a free consultation to potential clients and take on new clients year-round, meaning there’s never a bad time to get in touch. Contact us today!
