Page Loading Time | Integral Among SEO Procedures

by Prejushya Kalicharan - 1/11/2013 13884 Views

Lesser Loading Time Reflects In Improved User Experience Which In Turn Increases Conversion

‘Page loading speed’ is one important factor among On-page SEO methods. May be after fresh content, it should probably be ‘Page loading time’ that you have to concentrate on restraining visitors who may bounce back from your site. Users expect the websites they land-on via Google/Bing search, to be swift enough to display the necessary information they need. We conducted a study analyzing the ‘Page loading speed’ VS ‘Conversion Rate’. Here are the results depicted in the chart below.

PAGE SPEED VS CONVERSION SURVEY

When each page of your website consumes more than 2 seconds to load, your conversion rate drops. When the loading time rises further, the conversion rate turns a fantasy concerning your website. More than 50% of the visitors who visit our website expect our site pages to get loaded within 2 seconds, or else they quit.

In this survey, we had conducted the research gliding the ‘time taken’ data represented only in microseconds, which was later rounded to seconds for chart visibility and easy interpretation. Why I noted you on that is because each microsecond matters here. All calculations dealing with page loading time were done in micro and milliseconds, owing to the fluctuations each microsecond portrays over the graph. Hope this conveys you the importance of page loading time over your website’s conversion and ranking.

Following are some factors which shoot-up in the most positive way once you optimize your website’s site speed:

Google’s Open Declaration

Back in 2010, Google’s ‘Search Quality Team’ (now known as ‘Knowledge Team’) Chief, Matt Cutts emphasized site speed’s importance over SEO in his blog page as follows:

“I would love if SEOs dive into improving website speed, because (unlike a few facets of SEO) decreasing the latency of a website is something that is easily measurable and controllable. A #1 ranking might not always be achievable, but most websites can be made noticeably faster, which can improve ROI and conversion rates. In that sense, this change represents an opportunity for SEOs and developers who can help other websites improve their speediness.”

In the same blog post had he mentioned not to waste time optimizing Meta Keywords to gain Google rankings, though it helps you increase your site’s CTR.

Improve Rankings

Site speed surely has an indirect impact on ranking a website high which contains fast loading webpages. The unwanted time spent by Google bots to crawl only the peripheral content of your site will now be utilized in letting the bots to also dig deep into your subpages, which in turn results in good indexation of your site’s web pages.

Conversion Surge

A high Google ranking will definitely contribute to better conversion rate. More customers bring in much more improved business. Our study was based on conversions for a site with respect to improved page speed, to track the direct impact. And our speculations proved true. The deviation in the graph is much obvious. Higher the loading speed, lower will be your conversion rate. No one will feel excited to do business with a website that takes more than half a minute to load.

Tips to improve site speed thereby reducing page loading time

increase-website-load-speed

There are some websites loaded with lots of 301 directs exceeding the recommended level. This will definitely distract and confuses the search engine bot, where it gets redirected so many times, each time an additional path it has to travel to reach the destination, obviously increasing the loading time.
Loading your website with images of an appropriate & allowed size is extremely important which has a direct impact on page loading speed. ‘Save for Web’ option available on your image editor tool will be the best option when it comes to adjusting the size of images you plan to insert into your site. Images in form of photographs should be saved in the JPG format, while those which take the graphics form should be saved in forms of GIF or PNG format.
Facilitating your website users’ computer with caching the latest version of your webpages into theirs will be an easy way to reduce page loading time. Luckily, you will have ultimate control on how the search engine caches or stores your webpages at the user-end.
All your CSS & Javascript files need to be loaded in external files segregating them in the most appropriate manner. CSS into a single file and Java into a separate one, embedding them possibly at the head of the page. This avoids unnecessary restrictions caused due to flipping of webpages and also reduces file size.
Using Content Delivery Network helps your users to arrive at information available on your site at a much faster rate.

Check your website’s Page Loading Time over Google’s PageSpeed Insights and take immediate action if you score less than 80!

Category :

SEO News

Tags :

seo, Page Loading Time, Page speed, Conversion Rate, Improve Rankings, site speed

About Prejushya Kalicharan

SEO is a challenging field and I try my best to surpass this challenging environment which is unconditionally filled with opportunities, knowledge building and problem solving. I pursue what I .... more info about the author