Hello! This is Monica Thomas, the Search Marketing/SEO manager for medresponsive.com. This week’s podcast will cover “Ways to speed up your website for SEO purposes”.

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Hello –
This is Monica Thomas the Search Marketing/SEO manager for medresponsive.com

Read Transcript

Hello! This is Monica Thomas, the Search Marketing/SEO manager for medresponsive.com. This week’s podcast will cover “Ways to speed up your website for SEO purposes”.

The speed of your website is one of Google’s critical ranking factors used to determine your site’s positioning in the search engines. In 2010, Google released their PageRank algorithm. This is a series of highly critical factors that affect website rankings in the search engines. If your site loads quickly, search engine crawlers will be able to access and rank your website quickly.

As of 2016, Google also included mobile website speed as a major factor for determining their mobile search rankings. Most importantly in 2020, your prospects like us all are looking for instant results. We want our search results to come up quickly and to be as accurate as possible.

If a page takes a long time to load, we often get frustrated quickly and move on to the next page. The average load time for most sites is over eight seconds and can even exceed 11 seconds in the tech industry. However, the best-practice benchmark is under 3 seconds. According to experts, 53% of mobile users will leave a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Nearly 10% of web users will bounce to someplace else after 2 seconds. A speedy website greatly contributes to achieving your marketing goals such as improving your overall conversion rate, reducing bounce rate, or improving the service for your customers.

According to recent industry surveys, most online shoppers will not complete a purchase if a website is too slow. Most users expect your web page to load in under 2 seconds. At peak traffic times, online customers will opt for a competitor’s site instead of waiting. Google studies indicate that if you improve a page’s load time by just one second, your conversion rate can go up 10 – 20%. However, it’s not an easy task to speed up your website as it’s often hard to diagnose what it causes your website’s slow down.

As a first step, you should take a baseline reading of your website’s speed. Google and other sites have tools that will perform this task. Next, page load times can be improved through a variety of different methods such as:

  1. Remove unnecessary plug-ins and add-ons: Having unnecessary plug-ins and add-ons can reduce your website speed a lot. You need to address this issue, especially if you use blogging CMSs like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. In order to increase your page speed, avoid plug-ins that load a lot of scripts and styles, perform lots of remote requests. Add extra database queries to every page on your website.
  1. Optimize Caches: Avoid unnecessary server requests by ensuring that your mobile browser uses local memory to cache resources in order. Optimizing caches improve page load time a lot.
  1. Compress images: Large images are the biggest reason for slow page loading. To fix this issue, compression is the top optimization technique that can be used.
  1. Reduce redirects: Even though redirects are necessary especially when you move and delete pages and are the best way to eliminate issues with broken links, having too many of them can create additional HTTP requests, which can negatively impact speed, particularly on mobile devices. To identify all of unnecessary redirects on your site, you can use any SEO spider tool or crawler software such as Screaming Frog, Spotibo and many more.
  1. Minimize JavaScript & style sheets: Carry out minification, the process of removing all needless characters from source code without changing its functionality to speed up your website. The same process is applicable to mobile sites also, as it helps to reduce the overall bandwidth consumption and improve mobile caching.
  2. Use Content Delivery Network (CDN): To improve average page load time you may use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This is a system of distributed servers that deliver web pages and other web content to a user based on the geographic locations of the user. Another benefit of CDN is that they consist of multiple networks, which each make a copy of the website, stored into multiple geographical data centers and then provide users with quicker and more consistent access to your site.
  1. Improve server response time: When reviewing your server response time, you should aim approximately for a time under 200ms by reviewing different performance metrics and looking out for things like slow routing, lack of memory or slow database requests.
  1. Reduce wasted white spaces: White space, line returns or even comment tags can build up and increase your page size by 10 – 20%, which might negatively impact your page load time. So, review your pages and examine each line of code to make the suitable change required to maximize performance.

In conclusion, website speed optimization should be one of your main priorities. Visitors and the search engine crawlers expect websites to be lightning fast and if you fail to deliver on their expectations, you will risk losing rankings, website traffic and ultimately revenue.

Researching and understanding how to speed up your website effectively can often be a tricky and time-consuming task. The SEO, Web Design, IT and Search Marketing team here at MedResponsive can help you with any of your SEO, Google advertising, web design or internet marketing needs. Please contact us via phone or email with any questions. Have a great day or evening!

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