Website Speed Slowing Down Your SEO?

Web Speed Ranking Factors

The speed of your website matters. Google has many ranking factors in determining where a website will appear in search results. These factors include many on-page details. This includes page titles, keywords, inbound links (and the quality of these links), latent semantic keywords (related keywords to the one searched), social signals and other factors.

As well as the on-page SEO factors that Google and other search engines will use as ranking factors are off-page technical SEO aspects. These include code validation (check your website) and what we are talking about today – site speed.

Numerous factors that many websites fall foul of when it comes to increasing the speed of a website may hurt your SEO efforts and stop you from appearing higher in search results.

Underneath, I will list the most common ways your website might be going too slow and how to improve this.

1.Images and Image size

The number of images that you have used on a page can have an impact on the load time of your webpage. This is because each image has to be called up from your server. Which increases the work an internet browser has to perform to display your webpage. This can slow down the display of the webpage depending on how many times the images have to be displayed.

The size of the images is one of the most common issues that we come across. When blogging or uploading more content to the website (which is great!), many people will upload images straight from a high-quality camera.

These images can often be over 10Mb each. A high-quality image on a website shouldn't need to be over 300kb, which some would argue is still far too much!

The more very high memory size images there are, the longer these images will take to download. This creates a lag on your website and increasing the loading times.

To combat this, run your images through photo editing software such as photoshop and reduce the file size by re-saving as a lower quality jpg or png (use save for web and devices).

You can then compress the images using free software on the internet (search for image compression). We use software called ImageOptim for Mac, which does a great job at reducing the file size of images without affecting the quality.

2. Too Many Plugins

When people are looking around at how to improve their websites, they come across a website that will feature a list of plugins that are 'must have or similar. Once this is spotted, it is often the case that all of these plugins are then downloaded (whether they are then used to good effect is not known…).

Plugins for WordPress or extensions for Joomla are often a godsend and can help increase functionality on the website. However, each plugin comes with its CSS and javascript files. Which can slow down the website from loading many times. These plugins can do the same job as other plugins that have been downloaded.

Only download the plugins and extensions essential to your websites, such as contact forms or security plugins. Deactivate and delete the plugins that are not being used. This will reduce the number of calls on the server and speed up the page's loading time.

3. Calling Pages/Images That Don't Exist

There will often be links within the site trying to display content from a location that doesn't exist! The web page will try to visit the link location and hang around waiting for a response before returning to the site empty-handed. This hanging around is loading time on your website.

Most of the time, this will happen when a website has been redesigned or just been made live after coming from a different location. A developer will build a website on a private server and then publish it live on the internet when it is ready. There will often be links to the old, private server that will no longer be accessible.

Alternatively, you may have linked to an image from a different website. Suppose that website has a slow server or is located in a different country (or perhaps removes the images from their website). In that case, this will result in slow loading times for your website as the page tries to display the information on the link.