Great content and natural links have always had a preference by Google and weak content with unscrupulous links have been penalized in terms of rankings. But, rankings in SERPs does not entirely depend on keyword research and link acquisition. The technical aspects such as site speed also make a difference in organic traffic and ultimately the performance of your website.

Website speed – why does it matter?

Driving prospective customers that are generated by great SEO with awesome content to websites that are sluggish, completely erodes the customer experience and trust. It is a known fact that pages that load in under one second are converted at a rate of around 2.5 times higher than pages that loaded slower than five seconds or more.This isn’t limited to only slow pages. It is also observed that there is also a difference in the conversion rates of ‘fast’ pages and ‘really fast’ pages. 

Users demand really fast sites

5G is here and it will cover almost 65% of the world’s population by 2025. Well, with a network power that offers that high speeds, customers will definitely expect more speed from the websites they visit. When the whole world is powered by smart devices with a powerful network, the only thing that will throttle the user experience is the speed of the website and poor infrastructure.

Make website speed your priority

Conversion rates for a site are no doubt the most important factor for success and the website speed is one of the influencers for conversions. So, here are a few pointers to make your website speed a priority.

• Enable compression – There are automated tools to reduce the size of images and videos. This will improve the site speed.
• Manify Javascript, CSS and HTML – This is the process by which you can use automated tools to strip out spaces in the code to save a few kilobytes and improve speed.
• Check all links and redirects – Work with a frontend developer to check the redirections and make sure all are working correctly.
• Remove render-blocking javascript – consider tag management platforms to take the JavaScript weight off your pages.
• Leverage browser caching – Browser caching of website resources that don’t change very often is easy – use the htaccess file.
• Improve server response time – Check your hosting service and optimize your databases. 
• Use CDN (Content Distribution Network) – this could be time consuming and expensive. Check whether this is the best option for your business – if you have that kind of content on your website.

Website speed does matter – not only for SEO Services, but also for customer experiences which ultimately impacts your conversion rates. Ensure that it is optimized!