Why should we take site speed optimization seriously?
You may not believe it, but optimizing site speed is one measure directly related to site ranking and user experience for our audience. There is nothing worse than taking all the necessary steps for SEO but forgetting to increase the site’s speed!
Site speed optimization is the beating heart of the user experience. It is more than anything else involved in improving the user experience and increasing the site‘s natural click-through rate. If you have not yet taken the issue of site speed seriously, read on to find out the various effects of site speed in SEO, and get acquainted with immediate and professional solutions to increase site speed.
Why should we take site speed optimization seriously?
Perhaps the first question that comes to your mind is, What is the importance of optimizing the site’s speed? Research shows that a user only waits between 0.3 and 3 seconds for a site to open. If it takes longer for our site to load to display more information, the user will lose focus and possibly close the browser window!
Sites with higher loading speeds will have lower bounce rates, higher conversion rates, and better ranking in organic search results. More importantly, they will provide a better user experience to your audience. Slow sites are officially wasting SEO and site maintenance costs and damaging our brand. On the other hand, faster loading of our site pages will have a positive effect on traffic, user retention, and sales. In the following, we will examine the effects of site speed in SEO in detail.
The importance of site speed optimization in technical SEO
Google has repeatedly stated that the speed of sites is one of the most important factors in their ranking, because it is directly related to the user experience of using the site. This is exactly why Google unveiled the Mobile First Index algorithm in 2018. With the unveiling of this algorithm, sites, in addition to the web version, had to take action to speed up their mobile version. But the issue does not end here, site speed optimization has an impact on technical SEO in two dimensions:
1. Optimize site speed and improve user experience (UX
Increasing the speed of the site improves the user experience. If our site loads faster, the user will stay on the site longer, and this is great for Google!
Google’s first and foremost goal is to improve the user search experience. For this reason, it implemented the first mobile algorithm so that sites, in addition to speeding up their desktop versions, also work on optimizing their mobile versions and improving the user experience of audiences who use mobile to search Google.
2. Optimize site speed and increase conversion rates
Slow sites eliminate conversion rates. The conversion rate may not be directly related to SEO, but if you know that, according to Google statistics, 47% of visitors prefer sites to open in less than 2 seconds, you will change your mind!
According to the same statistic, 40% of users leave a page if it does not open in 3 seconds. This means that if our site takes more than three seconds to load, we will lose almost half of our visitors before they enter the site. This alone will significantly impact the potential conversion rate, as it is very unlikely that they will return to our site after this experience.
Get acquainted with present-day techniques that came from Core Vital Web
Now that the importance of site speed optimization in SEO is clear to us, it’s time to get acquainted with Google’s critical core factors for assessing site speed. Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics that Google introduced in 2021 to evaluate key aspects of the user experience when a site loads. These factors include:
Lcp (Largest Contentful Paint)
The first and most important criterion of Core Web Vitals is the site’s LCP value. This metric indicates how long it takes for the site’s largest content to be displayed to users. LCP measures the full rendering time of a page’s main content element.
Cls (Cumulative Layout Shift)
What is CLS? It is an essential and user-centric criterion for evaluating a site’s visual stability. This measure measures sudden changes in site layout, or bounce, during loading. The lower the CLS, the better the site user experience.
Ttfb (Time To First Byte)
What is TTFB? The interval is when the browser connects to the server. This criterion measures the exact time between the first connection to the server and the site content loading. The higher the number, the longer it takes for the site to be displayed to the user.
Tti (Time To Interactive)
Tti is the time it takes for a page to become interactive. This interactivity includes valuable content, the time it takes to load visible elements, and the page responds to user interaction in 50 milliseconds.
Tbt (Total Blocking Time)
Tbt, along with Lcp, is the most important benchmark for our site in Page Speed Insights. It measures how users interact with the page and how long a page is unable to receive input from users.
Google measures these factors to rate our site’s speed. Optimizing your site speed requires improving your site ranking on each factor. In the next section, we will introduce site optimization methods.
Website speed optimization training with 14 instant and professional methods
There are several ways to optimize site speed, but we will introduce the best and most practical ones to you:
1. Use high-speed hosting to increase site speed
The first and most important factor in increasing the speed of the site is the choice of high-speed hosts. Hosting has a huge impact on slowing down or speeding up the site, and unfortunately, most SEOs are not aware of this. When buying hosts, we should not even go to shared hosts because we have several other sites on a dedicated server, and their use of this resource will slow down our site.
2. Activate LAZY LOAD
Usually, when we enter a page, the browser starts downloading all the elements and images of the site. Despite thousands of codes and images, this process may take more than 5 seconds, which will cause user fatigue and increase the site’s bounce rate. LAZY LOAD allows the browser to download only the visible parts of the page after entering the site and to load the lower parts as the user scrolls.
3. Optimize your site template
Site template optimization is one of the factors that optimizes site speed. There are several factors in coding templates, including old and non-standard code, a lot of commented code, excessive use of JavaScript code, heavy images, and inline CSS code, which can slow down the site. These factors can be modified in custom formats but not in ready-made formats, and you must replace the site template.
4. Optimize the size of the site images
You may not believe it, but reducing the size of images on the site significantly helps to increase its speed. Bulk images prevent site optimization speed by slowing loading and filling the browser cache. To do this, we need to know the size of the images on different site pages and design the images according to those dimensions. Also, in Photoshop, the size of the images must be changed to a minimum. We suggest that you read the article on image size reduction software.
5. Optimize the home page of the site
The site’s main page is the site’s most visited page. So, fast loading is more important than any other page. This page should be optimized from the structure to the images and elements. Site optimization, footer, and sidebar optimization are of particular importance. Also, the icons of different site sections should be optimized to address site slowdown factors.
6. Use the browser cache
Different browsers store a lot of information, such as images, JavaScript files, etc. تا, so the next visitor does not have to reload the entire page. Site cache is a feature that increases the site’s loading speed and helps improve the user experience. We can use reputable plugins like WP-Super-Cache or W3-Total-Cache to manage the cache of WordPress sites.
7. Use a CDN or content distribution network
A CDN, or Content Distribution Network, is a collection of servers located in different parts of the world whose job is to store a copy of our site for users. This way, when the user wants to connect to our site, the nearest server sends us the user’s information. Using a CDN is very useful for sites hosted abroad, as it helps speed up the site.
8. Identify and delete 404 pages
404 pages cause a sharp drop in site speed by creating additional requests. There are several tools to identify these pages, the best and fastest of which is Website Auditor. After identifying these pages with the help of 301 redirect plugins, we redirect these pages to the most relevant page of the site.
9. Remove extra plugins on WordPress sites
Plugins are the most attractive and valuable tools for better managing WordPress sites. However, excessive installation of these plugins will slow down the site due to their constant updating. These plugins are also made of code, the increase of which can also reduce the speed.
10. Remove unnecessary site sliders
Sliders make the site’s home page and internal pages beautiful. However, these attractive elements reduce the speed of the site. The sliders are made of high-quality images, which makes the loading of our site pages slow.
11. Update the PHP site
In WordPress sites, in addition to updating the WordPress kernel and plugins automatically, we sometimes have to update the PHP version of the site through the hosting panel. The new version of PHP can significantly improve the speed of our site. So, how much better to pay special attention to it.
12. Enable the Google PageSpeed module on the site
Google has designed the Google Page Speed tool to improve the audience’s user experience. By activating the module of this tool, the best steps to optimize the site’s speed are automatically taken. Just download this tool and activate it on the site’s web server.
13. Compress CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files seriously
A large part of the size of each page is CSS, HTML, and JS code. Optimizing these codes can significantly increase the speed of the site. Google’s recommended tools for compressing this code are CSSNano and UglifyJS.
14. Delete Google fonts
Removing Google fonts is another factor in improving the site’s loading speed. The existence of the Google font code snippet has practically no use in Persian sites and only increases the number of site requests. So, how much better would it be to remove this code and help speed up our site?
Introducing two practical tools for testing site speed!
To know if our site needs speed optimization or not, we need the help of tools. The tools evaluate the speed of different site pages and tell us exactly where the site speed problem is. Here are some of them:
Google Page Speed tool
This tool is one of Google’s free products, but we can only use it with the filter breaker at the moment. It is based on Lighthouse and uses field data to evaluate the site. Chrome collects this data in its user experience report, and we can see how the page we want works according to users’ tastes.
GTMetrix tool
GTmetrix is one of the most popular tools for measuring site speed. This tool provides important reports such as page speeds, Core Web Vitals values for speed, YSlow, Waterfalls, and visual reports of the historical data of the pages under review, completely free of charge.
Google Chrome extensions to test site speed
Google Chrome provided some free plugins to test the site’s speed. The names of these plugins are listed below, and they can be downloaded from the Extensions section of Google Chrome.
- Page Load Time
- Telemetry Page Speed Monitor
- Performance Analyzer
- LoadFocus Load Testing
Introducing the best WordPress site speed optimization plugins
One of the most important parts of this article is learning how to optimize site speed, recognizing that plugins installed in the WordPress panel help improve the speed of these sites automatically. In the following, we will introduce them to you:
WP Rocket Plugin
Rocket plugin is the best plugin for speeding up WordPress sites. This plugin can take a few important steps to optimize the site’s speed: buy a copy. In the following, we will get acquainted with the important and useful features of this plugin:
- Compression of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code
- Enable load or slip load mode
- Activate the JSIP site feature
- Browser cache capability support
- JS code load control
- Optimize Google Fonts
WP-optimize plugin
WP Optimize is the second speed optimization plugin for WordPress sites. This plugin helps increase the site’s speed by optimizing the site’s database. The plugin deletes spam comments, deleted items, and all other database extras and makes the site more agile.
Of course, in addition to these two popular plugins, there are other plugins that we will only mention by name:
- w3 total cache; Site cache optimization
- Smush it: Optimizing the size of site images
- AUTOPTIMIZE: Optimize the number of server requests
- a3 Lazy Load: Activate the ability to load or slip lazy
Is site optimization better in the desktop version or the mobile version?
As we said at the beginning, the site’s speed is tied to the user experience. Slowly loading pages have a high bounce rate, and users run away. These pages even cause problems with the site’s conversion rate, because users do not have the patience to wait.
According to statistics published by Google, more than 55% of users used mobile phones for their Internet searches, and in some areas, this figure had reached nearly 80%! The same change in users’ behavior and desire to search for mobile, caused Google to implement the Mobile First Index algorithm so that mobile users enjoy exploring the web and are less likely to encounter unresponsive and slow sites. So if we want our site to rank better, we must also take site speed optimization seriously in the mobile version.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should we use all these tools to test the speed of the site?
No. However, using Google’s free tool, Google Page Speed Insight, is more recommended.
What can we do to improve the speed of our shopping sites?
We suggest designing a responsive template, improving the speed of the desktop version, and increasing the speed of the mobile version. Reducing the size of images can also be a good way to improve speed.
What effect does hosting have on increasing site speed?
Website hosting plays an important role in its speed, so a weak host can disrupt all your SEO efforts and programs.
Concluding remarks
Finally, we recommend that you take the issue of site speed optimization seriously. Check the status of site speed in both desktop and mobile versions, and if you need to optimize, use the strategies in the site speed optimization training section. If you can reduce the site’s speed to less than 3 seconds, it will undoubtedly have a significant impact on improving SEO and site ranking.
