Page speed is often confused with site speed – but they are two different things. Page speed is the loading time of a specific page on your website rather than the site as a whole.
How fast a page loads on your website dramatically affects the user experience. Pages that are slow to load can impact everything from bounce rate to engagement – and Google takes note of this, penalising pages that don’t load quickly. As such, optimising each page on your website is crucial for enhancing your search engine rankings.
You can use Google Page Speed Insights to check your page speed – but first, let’s start from the beginning. What is page speed, and why is it important? Below, we look at page speed in more depth and discuss how to improve it through simple solutions.
What Is Page Speed?
Page speed refers to how quickly a website page loads. Similar to site speed, there are many variables that affect it. These can include:
- Image size
- Plug-ins
- Themes
- Coding
- Servers
Why Is Page Speed Important?
If you search the web and click on a website, you’ll discover that most load instantly. However, many out there still take several seconds to spring to life. Unfortunately, if your website is one of them, you’ll see higher bounce rates. That’s because research from Google discovered that users expect a website to load within one second or less. Anything more, and you start to see sharp increases in users clicking away. Modern humans are impatient creatures, after all.
Page speed not only frustrates users; it also hurts your SEO efforts. Because Google favours the user experience, page speed is a prominent ranking factor in mobile and desktop internet searches. If there are problems when pages load, this speaks volumes to Google’s search algorithms; it tells the search engine that your website is not as user-friendly as it should be, therefore, it might penalise your search ranking.
Page Speed Test: How Is Page Speed Measured?
The best way to measure web page speed is using tools like Google Page Speed Insights. This insight page speed tool offers a quick and easy web page speed test to evaluate how your website compares to Google page speed industry benchmark factors. This web page speed tester tool also separates your pages’ performance on desktop and mobile devices. As a result, you can get a clear picture of which areas need improvement.
Fortunately, Google’s Page Speed Insights tool is simple to use. Just enter your URL, and it’ll analyse your domain in a few minutes. The tool then shows a web page speed test score from 1 to 100 for desktop and mobile versions of your website. Plus, there’s a colour-coded key to make the results simpler to understand, much like a traffic light system.
These are Google page speed industry benchmark ranges:
- Red between 0-49: poor page speed performance
- Orange between 58-69: moderate speed performance
- Green between 90-100: good speed performance
After diagnosing any performance issues, the Google page speed test tool offers various ways to improve page speed. Examples of suggestions provided by this web page speed test might include:
- Optimise image sizes
- Reducing unused JavaScript
- Reducing unused CSS
How to Improve Google Page Speed Insights Results
When you’ve identified the main areas you need to improve to adhere to the Google page speed industry benchmark guidelines, it’s time to look for potential solutions.
There are several ways to make quick wins with page loading times – ones that also support best practises when making or scaling websites to suit your business needs.
Some of these solutions include:
Choose a Good Website Hosting service
The variety of website hosting services makes it tough when choosing the best option for your website. However, like other products, opting for the cheapest isn’t always ideal. Cheap monthly hosting plans typically involve sharing your web space with other companies, which isn’t a problem when you have a small site. However, for larger websites, limited web space and many other users sharing server space can mean page load times suffer.
With this in mind, shop around for hosting providers that offer performance-optimised solutions instead. That way, you get ample space and a dedicated platform that optimises your website’s speed.
Optimise Image Size
It’s important to use high-quality imagery on your website. It makes it look professional and optimises product descriptions to improve conversions. However, large images can slow down your pages, which is why it’s vital to optimise image files for quality and size.
A solution is to compress an image size to reduce the bulk of the image. In doing so, you still get high-quality pictures, but your page load times aren’t affected as much. If you use a platform such as WordPress, there are plug-ins to help compress imagery. You can also implement lazy loading to avoid loading every image until it’s needed.
Using Caching on Web Pages
A great way to speed up page loading is to use web page caching. This process stores copies of your pages, reducing the need to load everything every time a user clicks on a page. You can cache web pages at the server level or use a plug-in, the latter of which does this for you.
Deactivate Unused Plug-Ins
If you use a CMS platform, there’s always a temptation to utilise tons of plug-ins that might perform various tasks. However, too many can cause page load speed issues on your website. Plus, there’s also the risk they break and affect your site’s display.
If you need to use plug-ins, keep them to a minimum – and don’t forget to deactivate and delete any you don’t use anymore to free up space. What’s more, installing external plug-ins can be a risk as they may pose a security threat. So, ensure to use trustworthy plug-ins only, and always have the most up-to-date versions.
Reduce Redirects
If you have pages that redirect to other pages, this might impair the ability of your site to load quickly. Sometimes, redirects are necessary; however, determining whether others are needed and getting rid of those that aren’t will help speed up page loading times.
Minify JavaScript and CSS
Minifying these files involves removing unnecessary characters, code and elements that affect file size. In addition, clearing up the code helps to improve page speeds.
These files load in two different ways:
- Synchronously – loading one file at a time
- Asynchronously – loading multiple files at a time
Choosing asynchronous loading may speed up the page loading time. You can set this up to optimise page loading speeds with plug-ins such as Async JavaScript and Autoptimize.
Google Page Speed Insight: The Takeaways
There are numerous best practices to implement to improve page speed. Once you incorporate and optimise each one, run your site through Google’s Page Speed Insight tool to check the fruits of your labours. If any areas are still underperforming, the application will offer solutions you can act on to rectify the page loading speed issues.
However, it’s worth noting that while the Google page speed test tool gives suggestions on what to improve to get your pages to load faster, these may not directly affect the performance score in the Page Speed Insights tool.
As experts in all things website optimisation and SEO, our friendly teams here at Click Intelligence are more than happy to help if you have any questions or need assistance in these complex areas. Simply get in touch and chat with our gurus – we’re merely a phone call or email away!
