A slow website guarantees bad user experience and hurts SEO! You definitey don’t want your website to be slow because one of the most important SEO techniques is to have webpages that have a fast load time.
What is Page Speed?
Page speed, also referred to as page load time, is (in layman’s term) how fast your website loads. Put more correctly, pagespeed is the time it takes to fully display the content on a specific page.
Technical Jargon (you can skip): For a technical SEO person, page speed also refers to the “time to the first byte”.
How does page speed affect SEO?
Page load time is very important for user experience. A web page that loads pretty fast promotes great user experience. On the other hand, slow websites are bad for user experience.
Because a lot of things about SEO centres around ensuring great user experience, if your web pages are slow, it will hurt your site SEO.
What you can do to get started with optimizing your page load time:
Free SEO tools to check page load time
To get started, let me show you some of the best tools you can use (free of charge) to check the load speeds of your website. Interestingly, these tools also tell what is wrong with the ages and how you can improve them.
1. Google Pagespeed Insights
One of the cool things about Google Pagespeed Insights is that it will (in addition to testing for desktop) test your site with respect to mobile platforms and provide you with a detailed report of your current score and what you can do to improve it.
Remember that most websites have most of their visits coming from mobile devices, and your site is likely not an exception.
How to use Google Pagespeed Insights
- Got to Pagespeed Insights
- Enter your website/page URL (eg. https://example.com)
- Submit and wait for the results
The tool will display your page performances and suggest improvements.
2. Pingdom Tools
Pingdom Tools is another popular SEO tool that helps you check how fast your web pages load.
This tool is simple and free to use (at least for checking the speed) and also gives you a breakdown of areas the page is doing good and areas that need improvement.
How to use Pingdoom Tools to check page speed:
- Go to tools.pingdom.com
- Enter your URL (eg. https://example.com)
- Select a test location closest to your target audience (to get the most accurate representation of your page load).
- Submit and wait for the tool to do its work and show you the results.
3. GMetrix
GMertix is yet one other popular SEO tool for checking page load time. Just like the Pingdom Tools and Pagespeed Insights, GMetrix tests your web page, shows you the performance scores and opportunities for improvement.
How to use GMetrix to check page load time
- Go to GMetrix.com
- Enter your page URL in the space provided (eg. https://example.com)
- Submit to see the results
How to improve your page load time
So you have checked your website speed and the result is not satisfying? Don’t worry, what your site needs is proper technical SEO.
PROBLEM: The tools I mentioned above will provide you with information on how to improve your pages load time. However, if you are not technical SEO savvy, you might find it difficult to implement those recommendations yourself.
SOLUTION: But the good news is that you got me by your side. I will help you improve your pages load time if you are ready to work with me. All you have to do to get started is contact me here and drop your page URL with me.