What is the importance of site speed for SEO?
What we do know is that Google cares a lot about website speed. In fact, they care about it so much, they added into its search engine ranking algorithm. Site speed should be a priority in 2024.
Google confirmed that site speed is a ranking factor in 2010. The Google team confirmed that they are obsessed with speed. They included the new ranking signal to improve user experience (UX).
Speeding up your website is not important, it's imperative to achieve online success. A faster website means happy users, slow websites see a higher bounce rate, as users lose interest and move on to competitor websites.
In 2018, Google introduced “speed update” to its mobile search results and in 201, they explained that site speed and user experience were both ranking factors included in their Core Web Vitals.
Site speed, also known as page speed, are terms used to describe how quickly your web page becomes functional for a user. In order for this to happen, it must be fully loaded into a initial view port, with any interactive elements as quickly as possible.
An average user may say your web page is fast or slow at loading, but there are numerous factors that could influence this. Search engines look a variety of signals to analyse your site speed and performance. Google uses varying aspects to measure site speed, including:
Slow loading times can have an indirect impact on your brand visibility and search ranking. Search engine algorithms reward websites that provide a positive user experience (UX). When your site loads quickly, you provide a positive user experience, which will play a role in your ranking and visibility.
Slow loading pages are problematic for search engines, from a crawling and indexing point of view. Page load times are an effective way to ensure your site is crawled and indexed quickly and effectively.
Site speed is not only important to your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs), it is also important to how your visitors interact with your website. Studies have shown that websites that take less than a second to load convert 2.5 times more than a website that takes five seconds to load. A slow loading website increases bounce rate, hindering your SEO efforts.
Things have changed dramatically since Google announced that site speed is a ranking factor. We now have mobile first indexing to think about. As a result, mobile visits are exceeding desktop visitors to top websites. On the other hand, desktop traffic tend to have a higher dwell time and lower bounce rates.
It is important to remember that Google will now crawl and index your mobile friendly website, rather than the desktop version of your website. This means ensuring your mobile website is fast loading, as mobile web pages tend to take up to seventy percent longer to load than desktop sites.
Site speed is essential when you take that a few milliseconds could be the difference between ranking well and being seen by your audience, or not. In addition to this, a few milliseconds can also increase your bounce rate, having a negative impact on your rankings in SERPs.
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