Website Page Speed, How It Impacts SEO

Website Page Speed, How It Impacts SEO
August 15, 2019 Mike McLeland

Website Page Speed, How It Impacts SEO

If you have had a website for a while, you likely know what SEO means and the importance of it. If you are new to the web, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In other words, it is how to make your site more attractive to search engines so you end up on pages 1 to 3 rather than page 100 in a search for products like yours. Many things affect your attractiveness to search engines; popular search terms, frequently updating your site, etc.

Since Google basically has the market share of searches, they set most of the rules that website developers must know to make your site more attractive to Google. From time to time Google changes the rules and if you don’t change your site with it, or have your developer do it for you, you may slip from page 2 to page 20.

One example of this is the frequency with which you update your site. At one time the search robot algorithm wasn’t concerned with how often you updated your site. Why would you? You put your site up, people liked it, you had a decent conversion rate (searches to sales), and your product line hasn’t changed – price included. But Google decided that if you didn’t update your site at a certain frequency rate that your site was stale and fell in the hit rankings. This is why you have blog posts on a regular basis. Your site is updated regularly and the robot knows it. You move back up in the rankings.

One of the things Google changed in the last year was how page speed changes your search rankings. Though how fast your site loads has always been one of the factors that contributed to how Google ranks your site, which affects where you appear in the search results list, they changed the importance of how quickly the page loads for mobile users. Why? Because browsing on a mobile device had remained the top method of web browsing for two years. For those new to a web presence, more people look for your business from a mobile device like a phone than from a fixed location device like a desktop computer. Research indicates that if a page takes more than 5 seconds to load on a mobile device the searcher moves on to another page.

What Can You Do?

Whether you maintain your site yourself or you have someone do it for you, check to see what your page load times are. Pay particular attention to pages with photos. There are tools that will optimize your photos for speed without losing quality. If you want to check your load speed there are free tools out there that can help. Google has a tool that can give you information on what you should optimize and there are other free tools that will test your site’s performance. You can even use those to test your site and your competitor’s. How cool is that?

Using these tools to check your site’s performance is definitely worth it. If you test your site and find it lacking you should hop to it and optimize. If, on the other hand, you have a web designer that you pay to maintain your site, you might want to ask the “What’s up with this?” question. If you don’t get a good answer it may be time to changed developers.

Regardless of whether you maintain the site yourself or have someone do it for you if you need assistance with your site contact North Texas Web Design. We’ll be happy to give you a quote to help you make your website more search robot friendly.

See what some of our customers say about us!

  • We have had the great pleasure of working with Mike McLeland for a number of years now. The quality of our website is fabulous. The true test is of course, does it make the potential clients want to take the time to inquire about our services? It absolutely does this. He created it so that it is easy for that potential client to decide quickly and with ease that they want to know more about us and our services. This is rare because a lot of websites in our industry in particular are extremely hard to move around once you have arrived.Additionally, Mike has a rare quality as a Web Designer. He understands who he can send an email filled with technical terms to and who he shouldn’t. The owner of our company receives the technical emails and I get the total opposite. This makes it so much easier for us to work with him.Lastly, his level of care is, ” Off the Charts!” There I no other way to describe it.I hope a lot of other businesses use his services.

    By Pamela Hackley of H1 Construction

  • Richard & his team took the time to understood what I wanted in my website and made it happen. The process was easy going and very enjoyable!

    Marina
  • Mike – I just received the best compliment on our site. Two  80 year old sisters were looking for a realtor to list their family farm. They called me a few days ago and I sent them to my site to look it over. She just called and said they were extremely impressed with my site and did not  plan on interviewing any other realtors.

    Thank you for doing a fantastic job!

    Alisha MossDiversified Realty Consultants (in Farmersville, Texas)

Mike McLeland
Owner – North Texas Web Design

Richard Taveira
WordPress GURU & Specialist