SEO – Search Engine Optimisation. Whether you’re constantly hearing the term being floated around in marketing speak, or are hearing about it for the first time, there’s good reason why. SEO determines where your website ranks on search engines, such as Google – which therefore determines who and more importantly, how many people find your business online.
Now there are many factors which influence SEO, but one you may not be aware of is website speed. According to siteground.com, websites that take longer than 2 seconds to load directly impact the SEO score of your site, forcing it further down the search results list – and potentially out of sight from your target customer.
There is an abundance of technical terms we could throw in the mix here when discussing website speeds and what to focus on. But the truth is, it’s all going to sound like white noise to you unless you’re an undercover SEO specialist (wait… is there something you’re not telling us?). There are over 200 ranking factors when looking at SEO, and with website speed being one of these, yes – it’s important, but you should think about the other 199 factors that affect your overall SEO as well!
The biggest takeaway when looking at website speed is ensuring your website is optimised for the best performance possible. This means both on-page and technical back-end SEO being optimised – which will improve both overall performance and search engine rankings.
Okay, so my website takes a few seconds to load… what do I do?
Firstly, stay calm – everything can be improved with the right tools at our disposal. The optimum website loading speed is 1 to 2 seconds. If you’re finding that your website takes 2 seconds or more to load, there’s a few things you can do yourself before hiring a professional to jump in and take a look:
- Check your images: Are they gigantic file sizes? Optimise them for web use by resizing them to more digestible size (be careful not to resize them too small, or they will end up looking blurry).
- Allow ‘lazy loading’ on your page, which loads the page AS the user scrolls, instead of loading the entire page at one time – causing delay.
- Take a look at your website host. Is it a reputable company? If you chose the cheapest on the market 10 years ago when you created your website, it may be a functionality issue with your host. Take a look at WordPress, GoDaddy, Squarespace and Wix as starting points, but make sure to do your own research.
Want to deep dive into technical SEO and see how much you can achieve yourself? Check out this amazing resource created by International SEO specialist, Aleyda Solis. Be warned though, you may need another computer handy simply to look up the definition of each term (it gets wordy!).
Need a hand? We are now offering website optimisation and full SEO services here at Marketing Movement, so shoot us an email if you’d like an SEO assessment. From there, we can chat through your options and provide a quote on improving your website performance.