Importance of Page speed for Google Search:
You might have been wondering why we had been stressing to all our customers and most of our SEO packages speak about page speed. Its imperative and well known in today’s search marketing methods which implies that page speed plays an important role in user experience. A user likes to see a website within 4 seconds of the time which they have landed on a page. The time seems very short but it is possible by implementing latest methods and tools.
I am about to discuss here few of the important aspects Page speed for Google Search which can really make your website faster for Google Search as well as improved user experiences. Its a well known fact and Google also announced in various forums that they consider and provide much importance to site speed as for one of its ranking factors. A website has to load within 2 to 4 seconds if not the user will leave the page. This had been proven practically with many statistical and analytical data over a period of research. Given the nature of the situation, many developers came up with solutions which tend to reduce the site speed and how to code better in improving the results of site speed increasing drastically.
There are several aspects we can nail down when it comes to page speed.
- GZip Compression
- Image Compression
- Specifying Image Dimensions
- Minifying CSS and Java Scripts
- Implying proper caching methods of pages, databases etc.
- Usage of a CDN Network
- Having Responsive Design
These are some of the key aspects which are required for making a website faster than it was before. You must ensure that these are done right from the beginning to ensure that you do not have to repeat this again at a later stage which might be a daunting task for you.
So what is Gzip compression? Its used to speed up your site and an effective common method to save your bandwidth costs. The idea is pretty simple, latest modern browsers are design in such a way that they mostly use and like gzip compressed sites. But how exactly does the server and browser communicate? When a user is trying to access a specific page, the server would send back a request to the browser asking if it would accept gzip compressed files. Once the response from the browser is a yes, server sends out a compressed file which inturn is displayed on the users browser at lesser file size thereby increasing the site speed.
Image Compression: Images play an important role in today’s fast growing tech savy, web savy websites. People like more modernized websites without compromising the quality of images. Keeping that in mind how are you going to load highly image driven websites without compromising quality and at the same time maintain site speed? That’s why we use image compression methods.
Specifying Image Dimensions: Its a good practice to inform Google and other search engines the image dimensions which enables them to better understand how your page design is structured.
Using Content Delivery Network (CDN): There is a lot we can speak about CDN. CDN actually helps you deliver your content cached in different locations around the world thereby reducing the page load time by latency. Our website is also powered with Content Delivery Network called MaxCDN. This stores or caches all the images, js files and others to ensure the site works with a full speed delivery of content.
There are several other things you must consider before fixing the site for page speed. Write to us if you need further assistance.