How Important is Speeding Up Your Website Loading Time?
- October 14, 2021
- Bradley Taylor
No matter which SEO you ask, they will all agree that website loading speed is an important part of the SEO process. Several years ago Google made it clear that website loading speed would be a major determining factor as to where a website would be ranked. This got every business and their SEO scrambling to find plug-ins which would do the job. Sadly, many plug-ins are not up to the task. It’s not that they are bad plug-ins, its just that the site’s are usually too robust.
Website speed is determined by a few things:
- Server capability
- Server connectability
- Website design and programming
You need to make sure your server has plenty of RAM processing capability. You can never be too sure of what is happening on your server if you used shared hosting. This is why many business are getting VPS (Virtual Private Servers). This way they can control everything that the server is doing.
Connectability is how your site interfaces with your server. Making sure that there is nothing slowing down your ability to connect to a server is paramount (unnecessary re-directs or DNS records are usually the culprit in this category).
Web designers used to build a website to be aesthetically pleasing and highly functional. Now they also have to consider how fast the site loads. You lose a little bit of the other two if you want a rocket-fast website.
Plug-ins
There are plug-in that help but they are limited in their abilities. If you have a site which is eating up huge amounts of memory with large images, there is only so much a plug-in can do.
Latest Efforts
I have stripped down one of my own sites of side bar images and extra features to get it as fast as possible. Ideally, Google wants your site to be fully loaded in under five seconds. WordPress, the content management system used by most web developers, can be slower to load than a static html site.
I have found that by totally stripping a site of large images and using the very best cache plug-in available, I can achieve a speed of 2.4 seconds. I am experimenting with the site mentioned above to see if there is a boost in ranking over the next month or two. Before I performed surgery on the site, it was loading on an average of 5.6 seconds. I will do a follow up post to share the results.
You can test your website speed with a free Google Tool Here
~Brad
