Does your website take long time to load? If yes, then this might cause frustration among customers which, in turn, will cost money. You need to win over the competitors to please your customers and of course, Google for improving the loading speed of your site. Thus, you need to reach quickly to avoid competitors from beating you at the end line.
So, is this something impossible for you? Well, web performance is no more an art but is considered to be science.
Mostly, users do not like when any website takes much longer time to load than it is expected. Read on to know why Google has taken this into its own hands so that your website loads much faster than anticipated.
1. Google’s Take on Site Speed – The world is changing at a rapid pace and Google – the powerhouse of authority and influence are interested in checking the loading speed of sites for several reasons. Earlier, Google had announced the importance of speed and it will be a ranking factor for mobile search.
What Google is actually saying is that speed underpins user experience. While browsing, try to get your webpage or channel to load, or add a product to the shopping cart as they are a major component of the overall UX.
For Google, speed = efficiency. As websites get faster, slow loading speed will affect your business and thus, you will end up losing many customers. Thus, consumer expectations’ will increase and the best experiences they get will become their expectation.
2. Approach Speed Optimization– According to professionals of a reputed UK based SEO agency, in case of speed optimization, you will win by several tweaks right now, every day and always. You will have to look for important bits and make them faster.Try to know about two fundamental truths:
• There is nothing called speed.
• The only thing which matters is the perception of speed.
3. There is no such thing as speed
Once you begin discovering this, it becomes very difficult to answer the question, “How will you measure speed?” How do you put a metric against how fast your site is?You may start by saying, the time it requires for a webpage to finish the loading.
But, what will that mean?What if the server responds quickly, but then it takes longer time to show the content?What if the page has components which load only when you scroll or interact? Are they all “finished”?We require much better definitions to know how well we are doing.Most stock metrics from optimization tools and speed check have been designed and flawed to provide false comfort.
Recently, Google’s Page Speed Insights tool was simply of no use. The score did not measure speed properly and the charts were bad as measuring against slow competitors makes you self-satisfied.
If you optimize your website in a way that you load important bits first with minimum delay, then this will make you feel better. This works as waiting without visual feedback is considered to be the worst slow speed of site.
Optimizing for First Contentful Paint will make your website feel and look faster. Your scores might not change however, the objective is not to optimize for scores but to make it faster.
4. The only thing which matters is perception of speed
Experts who work in a SEO agency in UK said, despite of what your website is, what sector you are in or how it works, there is one moment that you might want to measure and this is the time to be interactive.The Time to Interactive (TTI) metric measures how long it will take for a webpage to become interactive.
In simple words, how quickly can we make it ready? If there is an important thing to know,it is unlikely that Google will measure actual page speed.
What they are interested in is the perception of speed. If you want to create a lightning-fast site that is slow to load, then you have actually wasted a lot of time and money.
It is important to focus on:
• How can we show something quickly?
• How do we make it feel ready?
The challenge is that perceived speed is difficult to quantify. But the good news is that performance optimization is a science. You will find hard rules, techniques, processes and guides to follow for achieving it.
Every website can load in less than one second. All you need to do is follow the rules that can help in improving the loading speed of sites.
Author Bio:
Sanjiv Barnwal is associated with a reputed SEO agency in London and has great expertise in improving organic search result of companies on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. He loves to write articles and blogs on different topics. His great works include – how to write informative blogs on SEO, how to do successful Instagram marketing, why online marketing has gained immense popularity in the recent years and much more. He finds great interest in creating and launching SEO, Pay Per Click and Facebook campaigns. He has even worked on certain areas of improvement for optimizing site content and improving the ranking of DubSEO on major search engines.