Google is by far the most popular search engine, with 86% of users preferring it over Bing. So your SEO strategy should account for how its algorithm works.
When it comes to search engine rankings, speed matters. A slow website is like a dull knife—it’s not going to cut it. Google has made it clear that it wants fast websites.
If your site takes too long to load and visitors don’t stick around, you’re missing out on conversions and money. Users tend to be more satisfied with sites that load quickly, and Google rewards those quick-loading pages with a higher spot in the SERP.
Keep reading if you want to learn how fast your website should be to keep users coming back for more.
Website Speed Matters to Google
Google cares a lot about website speed. So much so that websites with less than 90 on Google PageSpeed Insights are pushed way down in the search results. Google doesn’t want to rank pages that provide poor experiences for users and make them wait too long.
A Slow Website Leads to High Bounce Rates
Bounce rate is an important metric that shows how many visitors leave your site immediately after they arrive on it. If people are bouncing off of your site, it means they don’t like what they see or how long they take to find what they’re looking for. You’re not going to get any SEO benefit from these people.
You need a bounce rate that’s between 26% and 40% to have a chance at ranking well. If your bounce rate is higher than that, then you’re losing traffic. If you’re losing traffic, it’s going to be hard for Google to see a reason to rank your site.
How to Perform a Speed Test
To perform a speed test, you can use one of the many free tools available online. These include:
- Pingdom
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- GTmetrix
After running your test, you’ll be presented with a series of charts and statistics showing how fast or slow your website loads. Keep in mind that it’s unlikely that you’ll achieve a perfect score on any of them.
Each tool will have its own interpretation of these results and recommendations for improving performance. The important thing is to understand what these numbers mean so that you can act on them and increase conversion rates. Some easy ways to improve your results are:
- Fix broken links
- Use a content delivery network (CDN)
- Shrink your images to less than 200KB
- Consider cloud hosting
- Cache your web pages
Boost Your Page Speed
As you can see, a slow website is bad for SEO. They lead to higher bounce rates and lower rankings. But don’t worry; we’ve been speeding up websites for clients all over the world.
We have the knowledge and experience to build powerful, high-traffic websites that are lightning-fast, and we don’t charge a fortune in the process. Book a free consultation with one of our web designers. We’ll evaluate your existing website and offer advice on how to boost its performance.
